John Daniel Dautel
(1881-1971)
John Daniel Dautel was born in New York City in 1881, but grew up in Paterson, NJ. He eventually settled in Haledon, NJ. Interested in drawing at an early age, he studied art through the Correspondence Institute of America (the Arts and Crafts School) of Scranton, PA, which was established in 1899 by Eugene Zimmerman, better known simply as “Zim”. Zim was known as the “world’s greatest cartoonist” and was a great influence on the young Dautel. He was also inspired by the drawings in his favorite magazines, Judge and Puck Library, and eventually became a professional commercial artist, opening a shop at 48 King Street in Haledon where he accommodated his customers’ needs for all aspects of commercial art – lettering, business cards, catalogs, programs, etc. Dautel also designed ties for the Paterson Silk Mills (the world’s capital of silk in 1900), specializing in Egyptian Revival, a very popular style at the time. Throughout his life, Dautel also aspired to become recognized as an artist of the fine arts and created numerous pen & ink drawings, portraits of family and friends, still lifes, and landscapes of New Jersey. He was a friend of the well-known painters John Grabach and Abram Tromka, who did an engraving of Dautel. Dautel went blind in the 1950’s and had to rely on the care of family members until his death at the age of 90 in 1971. His entire estate passed to his son and included a great number of works which went unseen for many years. His son died in March 2002, also at the age of ninety, leaving the time capsule of Dautel’s works from the early and mid-20th century. John Daniel Dautel is listed in “Who Was Who in American Art”. He died in Haledon, NJ in 1971.
