Victor Casenelli
(1870 - 1961)

Vittorio Casenelli was born in New York City on July 8, 1870 to Genoese parents. While Victor was still a boy, the family moved to Cincinnati. During his boyhood his interest in art and his talent for painting became evident. When he was old enough, he opened his first studio in Cincinnati where he designed backdrops for Pike's Opera Company and guest artist Paderewski. Casenelli also designed and painted murals and draperies for interior decoration. In fact, the Ohio home for President Taft displays evidence of the Casenelli brush.

In order to pay the bills, however, Casenelli ground out dozens of commercial pastels. At times, he feared that his talent was being wasted.

In 1904, he married Harriet Davies, a talented painter/composer who came from Canada. Searching for a quieter setting than Cincinnati, they found what they wanted upon a peninsula overlooking two lovely lakes on the shores of Lake Michigan. they chose a small village consisting of only thirty homes in North Muskegon. In 1905, Victor and Harriet Casenelli designed and built a modest cottage with a small studio connected to the house on the west side on a wooded bluff above Bear Lake. Here Casenelli lived and worked until his death on November 17, 1961, at the age of 91.

For about sixty years, Casenelli made his home across the lake from Muskegon. Owing to the extreme modesty of the artist and his aversion for publicity, there were many people who were barely aware of his existence and knew still less of his work, although a number of his canvasses are owned by Muskegon people.

Casenelli frequently traveled, sketching scenery for future paintings. Eventually, his paintings covered a range of subject matter, including pastoral, Indian, Venetian, and Michigan scenes. Gifted in many mediums, he produced outstanding works in pen and ink, water colors, and oil. Casenelli developed a unique style, realistic, but never photographic; moving, yet subdued; impressionistic, yet vivid; life-like, but timeless.

Lumberman's Bank Paintings

Victor Casenelli, a local artist, was commissioned by National Lumberman's Bank in 1929 to paint a sequence of pictures to commemorate their 70th anniversary. The 17 canvases were painted to depict Muskegon from the "beginning of its history" through its "Lumber Queen" era, and ending with the economic rebirth brought about by industrial development.

More impressive than words is the story of Muskegon as it is unfolded on canvas by the creative ability of North Muskegon artist, Victor Casenelli.

The paintings were exhibited in the lobby of the National Lumberman's Bank on Western Avenue (near where the old mall used to sit) until 1965 when the bank moved to their modern, new building at First and Webster. The paintings remained in the old Western Avenue building for nearly seven years. In 1972, when the building was to be razed as part of the downtown urban renewal, sixteen of the murals were moved to the auditorium at Muskegon High School, and the remaining one was placed on exhibit in the Hackley Art Gallery. There they remained until September of 1983 when FMB Lumberman's Bank donated the paintings to the Muskegon County Museum. In 2000, fifteen of the paintings were hung in the Coming to the Lakes Gallery, while the remaining two were put into storage. The paintings remain in this gallery today, hung around the top of the exhibit which discusses the migration of people to Western Michigan over the last 10,000 years.

Dawn is the prologue of Casenelli's story, so sunset served as the epilogue. The story of the paintings was explained as follows:
	"I started with the beginning of time. My first picture is Pigeon Hill at dawn, before any man came to it. I saw slopes and the lake in the foreground."

	"Now we go along the shores of Muskegon Lake with great pines and oaks, lonely, untouched."

	"... deer roam at will"

	"The Indian hunter stalking the deer."



	The story goes on...a white hunter with his coonskin cap and his long rifle."

	"...lumberjacks...felling the trees."

	"...the great bobsleds hauling the logs to the rollways on the river."

	"There are log jams and men with peavies breaking them up."



	"...rafts of logs towed from the sorting grounds to the mill by chunky little tugs."

	"Then there is the mill itself, still standing under the North Muskegon bluff near my home when I first came here."

	"...this is a lumber hooker..."

	"...a lumber hooker, as they operated by sail power before the larger ships came along."

	"...panoramic view of Muskegon when it was a town of frame buildings with rude docks and the rakish masts of schooners. IN the foreground is the corduroy road on which wagons and carriages jolted to and from North Muskegon."

	"...this is a more modernistic conception of Muskegon...factories and other buildings along the shore of the lake. Oil tankers at the pipeline docks, a steamship at its wharf, a plane overhead. In the foreground, automobiles whiz along a concrete causeway."

	"This shows a Chicago-to-Muskegon passenger ship emerging from the harbor channel into Muskegon Lake at sunset."

Victor Casanelli

Victor Casenelli (1870 - 1961)

Lumberman's Bank Paintings

Victor Casenelli
(1870 - 1961)