I never officially met Mr. Dunn but observed him from afar at the New York Society of Illustrators where he had been their president and I was still an aspiring art student.

Lo! body and soul!--this land! Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships; The varied and ample land,--the South And the North in the light--Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn. - Walt Whitman,

This is part of New York, part of the culture here. New Yorkers always try to find a way to deal with things like this. New Yorkers always find a way to overcome.

more like a prize fighter than an artist.

I think his prairie paintings are his finest work. He put everything he had into them. It was a kind of recollection of his youth, painting very directly and powerfully.

The portraits people will see in the show are from a phase of Dunn's career that most of his fans don't know about, ... He regularly did portraits of his friends, and a lot of figure painting as well. I think he mainly did it for recreation and didn't charge them for the work, or if he did it was very seldom.