Ferdinand Arnold Arthur Dahme (1877 - 1935). Impressionist landscape. Oil on canvas. 20 x 16 in., 25 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. (framed). This following biography was researched, compiled, and written by Geoffrey K. Fleming, Executive Director, Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV. Ferdinand Arnold Arthur Dahme (May 6, 1877 – April 20, 1935)A.K.A. “F. A. Dahme,” “F. A. A. Dahme”Landscape and figure painter, illustrator, and film animator. During the early years of the motion picture industry in New York City, Dahme was known as “The Famous Title Artist.”Ferdinand Dahme was born in Germany to unknown parents and arrived in the United States in 1891. He settled in New York City, where in the late 1890s he lived at 2101 2nd Avenue. By 1901 he was living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He married Margaret Henrick there in January of that year and had one son, Jerome Rembrandt Dahme Sr. (1901-1976). The family resided at 645 North Seventh Street. Later in his life Dahme would marry a woman named Johanna (known by the nickname “Lena”). Dahme remained in Philadelphia for more than a decade. During his time there he painted a portrait of James Milnor (1773 – 1844) for the Masonic Temple, Grand Lodge F. & A. M. of Pennsylvania, and worked as an illustrator for The Comrade, a socialist magazine based in New York City. He also served on Philadelphia’s “German Day” celebration committee in 1908 and on the “Junger Mannerchor” committee in 1911 – in both instances in charge of decorations.Prior to America’s entry into World War I, in 1916 he painted a near life size portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941) of Germany, perhaps to be used in a propaganda display at one of the many German firms in the New York City region. This painting survives and is known today, though its original purpose remains unclear. Like most men his age, once war broke out he registered for the draft. After his return to New York from Pennsylvania, or even possibly before, he became interested in the motion picture industry. By 1917 he was working on Alexander Avenue in the Bronx and living at 57 Ramsey Avenue, Bryn Mawr Park, Yonkers, New York. He was quickly successful during the early part of his motion picture career, and in 1919 he and his partner, Henry Seel, closed a deal to sell the rights to their creation – “Screen Follies” – to S. L. Barnhard and C. E. Eckels of the Capital Film Company. It was said that Dahme and Eckels were “besieged for the past four weeks with offers from distributing organizations throughout the country.” Their efforts led to a new type of animation which permitted a “distinctly different type of novelty picture,” though today it is not immediately clear what that was. The publication Film Daily described one of them this way: “F. A. A. Dahme and Louis Seel, who are turning out the Screen Follies for Capital, in producing issue No. 5, have seen to it that some of the women drawn have more drapery on their persons than in some of the preceding reels, and have bolstered the offering generally to the extent that it is now in shape to draw laughter. Some of the stuff is very funny, the entire reel distinctly novel, as are all of these issues, and as a whole, ready to go into the moderate-sized houses and create a good impression.”By 1920 Dahme and Seel had announced they were joining forces with Jaxon Film in Providence, Rhode Island, and were planning to “…pool the resources of the two units so far as animated titles and leaders are concerned…” It was also expected that “Seel [would] go to England next month to establish headquarters for the Dahme-Seel service. It is planned to serve English producers with art titles as is done by the parent company here.” He and his partner eventually sold the series for Great Britain to Aiaster Productions of London.In 1922 Dahme was selected as the animator for the famous 1922 experimental film made by Dudley Murphy titled “Danse Macabre,” while fellow artist Wladyslaw T. Benda (1873 – 1948) created the masks for the film. Produced by Visual Symphony Productions, the film depicts “A couple flee[ing] the plague, taking refuge in a remote castle where a violin-playing Death/Devil continues to stalk them. Shot quickly on a studio set as an art film than an experiment, Danse Macabre is told partly in dance, pantomime, and animation, to synchronize with a musical score of the symphonic poem by Saint-Saens.” That year Dahme sued the airplane manufacturer Albert H. Flint for his work on the film “The Soul of America,” which was a disastrous military related film, and was also known to have worked for the Film Frolic Picture Company. Most of his film business dried up with the advent of talkies, which no longer required the usual title and text cards that had made his career.Though involved in the picture industry, Dahme continued to paint, both historical subjects as well as landscapes. In 1924 he created a large oil about the contribution of Johann Gutenberg to the development of the printing press (at one time this work was owned by the George Glazer Gallery). During this period he traveled to Europe at least twice, once in 1926 (aboard the Munchen) and again in 1929 (aboard the Republic). In that latter year he had three paintings chosen for inclusion in the Transportation Exposition at Grand Central Station in New York City. And in 1931 Dahme was selected for inclusion in the Aviation Salon Exhibition held at 1335 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, which was held in recognition of the growing “enthusiasm for depicting the many phases of aviation…” According to The Philadelphia Inquirer the works Dahme included in the show stood out: “That capital painter, F. A. Dahme, is at his best here in the fascinating ‘We-Alone,’ the Lindbergh flight, of course, in which the personified elements of water and air are seen leading the young aviator on and fighting for his protection. In ‘Outwitted’ the Graf Zeppelin is seen forcing its way across the Atlantic. The clouds now take on the appearance of powers of evil, antagonistic and preventive, but the airship itself seems the embodiment of calm serenity. A gigantic wave below forms itself into the semblance of Neptune, here a frustrated god impotent against the mighty machine soaring over his crested locks. The classically titled ‘Per Aspera and Astra’ again reveals the struggle against personified winds, the vigor of their blowing being signified by lines from their mouths, in the fashion of those spring zephyrs in Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ in Florence.”In another twist to his varied life, Dahme was one of the founders in 1927 of the American Bureau of Chiropractic, which was headquartered in Brooklyn, Long Island, New York. During this period he resided with his second wife at 316 West 101st Street in Manhattan.Ferdinand Arnold Arthur Dahme died in New York City at the relatively young age of fifty-six on Saturday, the 20th day of April 1935. At this time it is unclear who handled his funeral arrangements but he was buried in the Myrtle section of Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx County, New York. His second wife, Lena, is also buried there.A few years after his death, a friend wrote a lengthy description of Dahme in “The Educational Screen” (1940): “There was Ferdinand A. A. Dahme, who, in the days of silent films, had established in the Chandler Building, in New York, a flourishing little business of hand-lettering and decorating title cards. He photographed the cards on an animation stand, which was common practice of men in his line, because the cards were easier to keep flat in the horizontal plane; and this equipment, of course, invited a wider range of service. So Dahme, guided only by his own inclination and some old textbooks, undertook to produce several subjects which he believed would be useful in schools - demonstrated movements of the solar system, the formation of land surfaces by glacial action and erosion, shown in compressed action, and more which I've forgotten. The individual scenes were striking and effective in their animation. Dahme was one of the cleverest airbrush workers I have ever known, and he was at particular pains with these examples. But he had printed legends and complicated arrangements of his material which the schoolmen found poorly adapted to their needs. I don't recall that he ever was able to dispose of them - not even when sound came in and wrecked every artist's business of supplying subtitles. What a pity that proper encouragement and guidance cannot be given to eager, able persons such as this man. Of course, it's too late now to help Dahme. Friendly, gifted, Dahme, with his gold-toothed smile, side-burns, tousled gray hair and Montmartre smock - April 20, 1935, he died.”Though there are undoubtedly other exhibitions in which Dahme participated, those presently known include the following: Transportation Exposition at Grand Central Station, New York, NY, 1929; Aviation Salon Exhibition, Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 1931.Dahme’s works are not known to be in any public institutions at present. The majority of his works reside in private collections throughout the United States.

Some crackle, as pictured