Eugene Francis Savage

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'Island Feast', mural by Eugene Francis Savage, Matson Navigation Company

Eugene Francis Savage (1883-1978) was an American painter known for his murals in the manner made official under the Works Projects Administration.

He was born in Covington, Indiana. In 1915,^[1] while studying at the Chicago Art Institute, he won the American Prix de Rome in painting, enabling him to study at the American Academy in Rome, where he received a bachelor of arts degree. Later he received bachelor (1924) and master of fine arts degrees from Yale, where he taught for twenty-eight years, while acting as a member of the Fine Arts committee of the American Academy in Rome, who ensured, though not a member of the jury, that a generation of winning artists were painting in the manner of Thomas Hart Benton or Savage himself.^[2]. He became an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design, 1924 and National Academician, 1926^[3]. Other contemporary influences on his public art were his Latin American contemporaries Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Savage also served on the National Commission of Fine Arts and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which he was elected in 1936.^[4]

Murals by Savage are on the campuses of Columbia and Yale Universities^[5] and in public buildings in Connecticut, the Elks National Memorial in Chicago, the new Post Office Building (now Ariel Rios Federal Building) in Washington, in Indiana and the renovated Court of Appeals Hall, Albany, New York (1959).

In other media, he provided illustrations for Coningsby Dawson's Christmas Outside of Eden. In 1938 the Matson Lines commissioned him to paint murals depicting native Hawaiian life, which were later adapted for menus and other memorabilia.^[6]

In 1935 and 1953 Savage visited Florida where he painted the experience of the Seminole Indians in their Everglades habitat especially taking note of the intrusion of modern civilization into what seemed to be a Garden of Eden pastoral existence. These paintngs were done at the same time the effort was under way to create the Everglades Nastional Park[1]. According to family records complete with photo documentation, this artist is the American sculptor Eugene Francis Savage (1883-1978).