Welcome!
This website is a tribute to the art and life of Francis Charles Peters (1902 – 1977), also known as “Frank” or “Pete” to friends and family, and as “Gaga” to his beloved grandchildren. Across the top of each page (or perhaps in some other kind of menu if you are on a phone or tablet) there are links to galleries of his paintings, loosely grouped by theme — click on them to explore his art:
or click on Artist Biography to learn more about his life.
Can you help us?
This is a work-in-progress by one of his grandchildren and one of his great-grandchildren, and maybe you can help to complete it: if you know of any paintings by the artist that are not in any of the galleries on this website, or if you know the whereabouts of any of the 11 paintings remaining in the Unlocated gallery, please let us know by sending an email — and if possible a picture of the painting — to this address:
fcpinfo@francis-peters.com
We’d love to see “new” paintings by the artist and add photographs of them to this website to have as complete a collection as possible.
About this project
I first had the idea of taking a comprehensive set of photographs of his paintings in 1983, when I was a college student minoring in Art History. I took slides of 165 of his paintings at three locations: his home, where our grandmother Bertha D. “Ganti” Peters still lived, and at the homes of his two children. At that time, Ganti also gave me a list of owners of about 50 paintings that had been given to friends or sold at shows over the years.
Time passed… More than 3 decades later, my daughter and I got interested in the project again and concluded that the slides were really not as good as we’d like, especially after trying to digitize them by various methods, so we set about doing a better job of photographing the paintings again using a digital camera and better lighting.
Since 2014 (it’s now 2021), we have found and photographed 325 works (including a few sketches and unfinished paintings) — all but 11 of the original 165 plus another 160 I didn’t know about in 1983. This task has been made more challenging — but also more fun! — as the paintings have been passed along to grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends of the artist and are now scattered from Georgia to Ontario and Massachusetts to Ohio. We are still hoping to track down and photograph the last 40-50 paintings that we know from Ganti’s list were given to friends or sold at shows; while the trail seems pretty cold for most of them, we still hope that with time a few more will come to our attention.