"The Dutch Master"
Zuppke’s first job as an artist came at the age of thirteen when he decided to drop out of school and become an artist’s apprentice at a sign makers shop. He made .50 a week and some of his earliest known works included posters for Benjamin Harrison’s 1892 reelection campaign. Zuppke returned to school after one year, but his urge to pursue a career in art did not subside, despite the misgivings of his strict German father.
At West Side High School, Zuppke contributed to their 1898 Hesper yearbook. The book opens with a full-page drawing by Zuppke and three more are found scattered throughout the text. After high school, he attended Milwaukee State Normal college. There he flourished in the art program and his skills were again on display in the school’s yearbooks.
After graduation, he moved to New York to try and make it in the world of art. He was hired to paint signs on Broadway, furniture advertisements, and women’s clothing advertisements. Unable to find steady work, Zuppke moved to Michigan in 1906 to become the athletic director at Muskegon High School and officially started his thirty-six-year career as an American football coach.
Zuppke continued to paint in his free time after becoming a football coach. He regularly displayed his works at exhibitions in major cities across the country including the Palmer House in Chicago and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City (Insert covers of exhibition pamphlets). Zuppke’s subjects were predominantly landscapes from places he visited in the American Midwest and Southwest. He and his wife Fannie made a habit of travelling to Arizona following football seasons and much of his work is of the desert.
After Fannie died in 1936, Zuppke’s output of art increased. By 1940, he claimed to have painted over 1,000 works in his lifetime, with most of them in private galleries and public showrooms. Zuppke’s health began to dwindle in the mid-1940s, but he continued to paint and exhibit his works until his death in 1957 at the age of 78.
Method and Style
Zuppke mostly painted in oils, but also used charcoal, crayons, pastels, and watercolors. To create a painting, he would typically first make a sketch of his subject in its setting using crayons. He then brought his sketch to his home studio and painted over the image. Zuppke worked quickly and often had paintings completed in four hours. His style was bold and impressionistic. He seldomly painted human figures, opting for trees, mountains, water scenes, and the desert for his subject matter.
The Cuban prints on display here are an outlier in method and style. Rather than rugged and powerful landscapes done in oil, the Cuban sketches all feature human subjects and are executed in predominantly watercolor, a medium rarely used by Zuppke.
Ned Brant Comic Strip
Zuppke’s artistic expressions were not limited to the canvas and gridiron. He was also the author of a sports themed comic strip called Ned Brant from 1929 to 1942. The comic was drawn by Walt Depew and Zuppke wrote the stories. The comic strip was about the adventures of a sports coach named Ned Brant. It was distributed by the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, whose publications were found in major cities throughout the country.
