To complement the 2024 Waterfowl Festival, this exhibition highlights Frank W. Benson’s well known sporting prints from AAM’s collection.

Born and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, American artist Frank W. Benson (1862–1951), grew up sailing, fishing, hunting, and birdwatching. These interests persisted throughout his life, and he ultimately became one of the fore- most American practitioners of the genre of printmaking known as the sporting print.

In the early 20th century, Benson established a reputation as a painter of portraits and landscapes inspired by French Impressionism. He joined a group of Boston and New York painters known as “The Ten” who organized carefully curated annual exhibitions of paintings between 1898 and 1918. He was also interested in printmaking, particularly etching. Beginning in 1914, he returned to his early fascination with birds, ultimately creating more than 300 images of the many species of waterfowl native to the beaches and marshes of New England.

Sporting prints by Benson first entered the Academy’s collection in 1987 when Berlin Voorhees included two of the artist’s waterfowl etchings with a larger gift of late 19th and early 20th century works on paper. The collection grew to encompass more than 30 works by Benson, largely due to the generosity of the late Robert K. Keller, who began donating prints from his collection to the Museum in 2001 and continued with these gifts until his death in 2009.