Biography

Everett George DuPen was born in Chico, California, on June 12, 1912, to George Everett DuPen, a jeweler, and Henrietta “Etta” Fidelia Freeman DuPen, an opera singer. At age three, he attended the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and became so entranced by the statues in a pavilion that he wandered off on his own until his mother found him. Whether family lore or truth, the story captures a fascination with sculptural form that would define his life.

A serious childhood illness kept him bedridden for years, during which he began carving small figurative pieces with a jackknife. By thirteen he was the subject of a nationally syndicated article praising his talent. After his parents divorced when he was sixteen, his art teacher Susan H. Burgess became a guiding influence—providing tools, art history books, and the confidence to pursue his gift.

DuPen studied sculpture and architecture at USC, Harvard, and the Yale School of Fine Art, where he earned his BFA in 1937. At Yale his instructors included George Eberhard, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, and George Snowden, Eberhard’s student—giving DuPen a direct pedagogic line to the great French sculptor. Rodin had bequeathed his sculpting tools to Eberhard, who in turn passed them to Snowden. DuPen won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award twice and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship, which took him to Paris and then to the American Academy in Rome, where the Greek and Roman masters left a lasting imprint on his figurative style.

He met Charlotte Canada Nicks—a dancer from Beaumont, Texas, who had performed with the corps de ballet of the Metropolitan Opera—while she modeled at Yale. They married on July 1, 1939, and would remain together for sixty-six years. Charlotte became his model, his muse, and his protector, as well as the mother of their six children.

After teaching stints in St. Louis and wartime work at the Sausalito shipyards, DuPen joined the University of Washington in 1945. Over thirty-eight years he rose from instructor to full professor and chairman of the Sculpture Division, building it into a nationally recognized program. He was equally celebrated for his life-drawing classes and for mentoring generations of Northwest artists.

His public commissions are woven into the landscape of the Pacific Northwest: the Fountain of Creation at the Seattle Center, created for the 1962 World’s Fair; the seagull-and-salmon fountain at the Washington State Library in Olympia; carved walnut screens for Seattle City Hall; the bronze of Charles Odegaard at the UW; and ecclesiastical works in churches from Tacoma to Longview. He exhibited nationally—from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design to a 1958 survey at Madison Square Garden alongside Milton Avery, Alice Neel, and William Zorach.

DuPen was elected a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society in 1963 and a full National Academician in 1979. In 1994, Seattle’s Frye Art Museum gave him a career retrospective, where he was celebrated by his many former students. In his final years, he was able to cast in bronze several early works that he had been unable to afford during the Depression. He died in May 2005 at ninety-two.