Penfold, Frank C.

Frank C. Penfold was the son of William Penfold, a portrait painter active in Lockport and Buffalo, New York. He trained with his father in portraiture and in 1884 studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. He eventually settled in Pont-Aven in Brittany where he taught in the artists’ colony there. He occasionally returned to the United States and remained an influential figure in the Buffalo art scene; he was an instructor at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, made president of the Buffalo Society of Artists, and helped organize the Municipal Art League in 1901. Penfold is noted for his marine, genre, landscape, and portrait paintings and particularly for his paintings of Brittany.