Deane Keller

Deane Keller BEM (December 14, 1901 – April 12, 1992) was an American artist, academic, soldier, art restorer, and preservationist. He taught for forty years at Yale University's School of Fine Arts, and during World War II was an officer with the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program.

Biography Keller was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1901. His father, Albert Galloway Keller, was a member of the junior faculty at Yale, but during young Deane's formative years, his father would become the first William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology. Keller attended the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, graduating in 1919.

As a student at Yale, he earned degrees in history and science in 1923. Further studies led to a B.F.A. from the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1926. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR) for three years. After returning from Rome in 1929, Keller began his career as a member of the Yale faculty.

His academic career was interrupted by the Second World War, when he was asked by School of Fine Arts dean Theodore Sizer to serve as a fine arts officer in the U.S. Army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program. At war's end, he returned to teach at Yale's School of Fine Arts. Captain Keller was primarily responsible for the identification and transportation of artworks in Tuscany, Italy, the center of the Italian Renaissance and a major site of Nazi looting. He worked in Pisa and Florence, where Nazi troops had bombed churches, destroyed or dislocated public art, and seized paintings from museums including the Uffizi.

Gallery In addition to his academic career, Keller was a prolific portrait painter. He was known as the "unofficial portraitist of the Yale faculty," completing over 160 portrait commissions for the university, including faculty, corporation board members, and two presidents. With one of his portrait subjects, Thomas G. Bergin, Keller worked in collaboration by illustrating the book On Sepulchers. Portraits for clients outside these Yale commissions included Senator Robert A. Taft, Governor John Davis Lodge, and presidents William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover.