The Ridgefield Garden Tour’s Spring Soirée on June 7 will be a night of celebration: of the new collaboration between the Ridgefield Garden Club and the Ridgefield Historical Society, of the beautiful gardens just come into bloom for the inaugural tour, Beyond the Garden Gate, and finally, of the historic home whose owners are so graciously hosting the Soirée.
The Boulders, built for German-American artist Frederick Dielman around 1910, stands on rocky ground where it’s thought British and American forces may have skirmished in the aftermath of the Battle of Ridgefield. It was Dielman’s home in the country until his death here in 1935.
One of two Ridgefielders to be president of the National Academy of Design (the other was Cass Gilbert, who lived nearby the Dielmans, having bought the Keeler Tavern in 1907), Frederick Dielman was born in Hanover, Germany in 1847 and came to Baltimore, Md., as a child. After graduating from Calvert College there in 1864, he began a career as a topographer with the United States Engineers, surveying potential routes for canals through the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. In the 1870s, he decided to pursue art and studied at the Royal Academy of Munich, Germany, before returning to New York where he maintained a studio for many years. He married Lilla Marion Benham in 1883 and they had three children, one of whom became a painter and sculptor, Ernest Benham Dielman (1893-1972).
A founder of the Society of American Artists in 1877, Frederick Dielman was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1881, serving as president from 1899 to 1909. Between 1878 and 1903, he occasionally taught at the Art Students League of New York and he was director and taught both day and evening classes at the Art Schools of the Cooper Union in New York from 1905 until 1931, when he was 84.
According to a Library of Congress biography, “It is believed that he taught more American art students than any other art professor.” A former student once recalled, “When Professor Dielman lectured to us, he was already well over 60. But he had a buoyancy of spirit and a twinkle in his eye which belied his years… The lectures were absorbingly interesting and sank deeply into our consciousness.”
Frederick Dielman was well known in his time for his murals, both painted and mosaic. The mosaic panels in the Library of Congress, entitled Law and History, are among his most popular works, but he also did many paintings and illustrations.
In 1933, when asked what he considered “the best recipe for a happy, well-rounded life,” Dielman said, “I think if a man tries to ascertain what is his probable function in life and then carries it out honestly, sincerely and with as little pretense as possible, he is pretty sure to come out right.”
