AVAILABLE PAINTINGS BY DUNCAN GLEASON

Joe Duncan Gleason's modest beginnings hardly hinted at his illustrious life to come. Raised in Los Angeles, youngest of three children born to a woman who was emancipated enough to divorce her husband, in 1894 at the age of 14, he began working at the Union Engraving Company as an illustrator. Over the next twenty years, thanks to scrapbooks kept by a doting mother, it is possible to keep close track of his growth and see how he developed the many different facets of his personality.

His main thrust was always art. While supporting himself as an illustrator, he completed his abridged schooling and art education at art school in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago (school year 1902-3) and finally the Art Students League in New York (1903-4 and spring 1906). In New York (1903-1914), he illustrated for such magazines as Leslie's Monthly, Ladies Home Journal, Forecast, Mother's Magazine and Hearst's Magazine. The New York years were marked a boundless energy that opened him to many new experiences. On at least two occasions he exchanged art work for free trips by train on the AT&SF in the summer of 1904 and the Northern Pacific in the summer of 1909. In fall of 1905, he traveled to and worked briefly in Mexico, and in 1910 he made a summer tour of Europe by motorcycle and of North Africa on foot.

At the same time he pursued his several other interests. He played a stringed instrument. And, in the realm of athletics, he became a champion on the Roman flying rings, winning, each year between 1907 and 1923 (with a break at 1914-1918 when he was in Los Angeles and couldn't compete) the American Amateur Athletic Association national championship. A sidelight of this skill were his acrobatics performances on the live stage. On top of everything, he kept his own yacht, a 36 foot yawl and was a frequent sailor on Long Island Sound.