Charles Frace

Artist Biography

Charles Frace was born in 1926 in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. He began drawing at five and taught himself to paint when he was fifteen. Frace remembers wanting to be an artist from an early age. His self-instructed talent earned him a scholarship to Philadelphia's Museum School of Art, where he graduated with honors.

In 1955, Fracé began a professional career as a freelance illustrator in New York City. Eventually, he became one of the nation's most sought-after illustrators of wildlife. However Fracé soon grew frustrated by the restrictions of illustrating ideas conceived by others and longed to paint art, prints and posters of his own. He finished only one, which his wife, Elke, took to a nearby art gallery. They insisted on displaying the painting in the gallery, and it sold that same afternoon.

In 1973, with the issue of Fracé's first limited edition print, he had finally made the permanent change to fine art. Fracé brings to his art, prints and posters over three decades of personal research and a close kinship with animals. Fracé and his art has been the subject of two books. Perhaps the greatest honor of his career came in October 1992, when Fracé as recognized with a one-man exhibit of thirty-six of his paintings at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Charles Frace Art, Prints and Posters Collection