Wilfred Israel Duphiney (1884-1960) was a portrait artist, born in Central Falls, RI. He attended Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and later taught courses at RISD for nearly 40 years. He made a living from commissioned portraits of (mostly) Rhode Islanders, and illustration work as well. Of course, some of my favorites were not commissioned -- but were faces of family and friends of my grandfather and others whom he thought had an interesting face. He was a member of the Providence Art Club and had a studio at the Fleur-de-Lys building at 7 Thomas Street on College Hill in Providence, RI.

This gallery is very much a work in progress...and one just begun at that (there are hundreds more images to add to the galleries.) For those visiting who are new to Pbase.com sites such as this, if you click on an image in the gallery it will take you to that page where you can see any further notes and the image will be larger. And if you would like an even larger image, under the image you will see an option to click on small, medium, large or "original". If you click on "original" you will get the largest image possible and may see details not otherwise visible (like dates, signature, sometimes brush strokes, pencil marks -- even doodles on the sides of drawings!). If an image has four dots on either side of an image title, that means it is a sub gallery. If you click on these, there will be more images to see.

As part of a larger personal research project, I wanted to create a gallery of my grandfather's art work. Some of the images are from photo documentation created at the time the artwork was completed -- I don't know who did the photography and they are in B&W (a little bit of a blessing in disguise since color film degrades quicker). Others images came from photos by family (myself included) - documenting artwork that hangs on their walls (or is stashed in a closet!). Recently, I have been contacted by other people who have offered to send photos of Duphiney portraits they own -- which was a pleasant surprise -- and I welcome and encourage other people to do this as well (lauraelizabethsebastianelli at gmail dot com).

Eventually, I hope to curate the galleries into more of an exhibition style, but for now I need to better see how much of the breadth and depth of my grandfather's work can be found, digitized, and posted here. While my grandfather was a prolific artist in RI, there is no central place to see his work. Duphiney's portraits (and even some other genres) can be found in the RI State House, Providence City Hall, Brown University, URI, RISD, the Providence Art Club, Catholic Diocese of Providence, libraries, hospitals and more, and perhaps more importantly in family homes throughout RI.

There is also a blog (recently migrated from Blogger to wordpress) at https://duphineyfacesofri.wordpress.com/.