A Life Forged in Tragedy and Realism Frank Duveneck, born Frank Decker in 1848 amidst the burgeoning river town of Covington, Kentucky, was an artist whose life story is as compelling as his powerfully rendered canvases. His early years were profoundly shaped by loss; the untimely death of his father to cholera when he was barely a year old indelibly marked his trajectory. This formative tragedy, coupled with his mother’s subsequent m…