DeYOUNG, HARRY ANTHONY

Harry Anthony DeYoung was born in Chicago in 1893. He was in his mid-thirties when he came to Texas and had already made his mark in the art world. A graduate of University of Illinois and Chicago Art Institute, as an honor student, he went on to teach for the next few years in the Midwest. His landscapes (oils) hung in several fine collections but his art had, by the late 1920's, made him no more than a living. He suffered a nervous breakdown so in 1928 he moved to San Antonio hoping to improve his health and that of his daughter who was a sickly child.
He was principally a landscape artist so Sa Antonio proved a happy choice for DeYoung because of a connection he made with the Witte Museum, where he subsequently did much work. His murals may be seen there and also at the St. Anthony Hotel. One quite famous painting of Davy Crockett in the siege hangs in the Alamo; and three portraits of James Bonham, Dr. Amos Pollard, and Mrs. John Dickinson.
From 1928 until his health failed in 1942, DeYoung was a teacher of art in studios in San Antonio or in summer art camps. He founded and directed DeYoung Painting Camp in the Davis Mountains, and instructed at camps held in the Hill Country, the Big Bend area and in South Texas, at Port Isabel.
During the first years in Texas, the DeYoungs lived in Boerne and he commuted to his San Antonio classes. On week-ends he would put his wife and daughter in the car and tour the back roads of the Boerne area, looking for sketch subjects. He developed a great love for the Hill Country, and for frontier culture. ( The result of this is the collection of the "Privy drawings" he sketched in the Boerne-Comfort area that are now compiled in the book "Texas Out Back")
In 1942, DeYoung had a stroke. His right side was paralized completely. He was not yet fifty. He refused to give up his art so he taught himself to paint left-handed and painted that way until his death in 1956, at the age of sixty-two. - from the Introduction to "Texas Out Back", by Leon Hale in collaboration with Anita DeYoung Ischar.

Source: Boerne Public Library files.- July 24, 2001