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Born in Buffalo, New York, Julius John Lankes (1884-1960) was a painter, sculptor, illustrator and woodcut engraver who first trained as a draftsman at the Art Students League before studying art at the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts, where he adopted the woodcut as his preferred medium. He also studied with the artists Ernest Fosbury, Philip Hale and W.M. Paxton. He was an Academician of the National Academy of Design, a member of the American Artists Professional League, the Print Society of England, the Society of American Graphic Artists, and the Printmakers Society of California. Lankes illustrated several books by Sherwood Anderson and Robert Frost including Robert Frost's New Hampshire and Westrunning Brook. In 1923, his friend Charles Harris Whitaker, editor of The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, was just beginning to study the barns of eastern Pennsylvania and he introduced Lankes to the artistic possibilities afforded by these majestic architectural artifacts. Lankes became fascinated with Pennsylvania Dutch barns and these became a leading theme of his woodcuts. His depictions include barns located near Adamstown, Carlisle, Chambersburg, Dillsburg, Elizabethtown, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lititz, Millersburg, Newville, Shiremanstown, Summit, Waynesboro, Wellsville, and Wescoesville. His works can be found in many collections including the Boston, New York, and Newark Public Libraries, the California State Library, the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums of Art in New York, the Carnegie Institute, the Library of Congress, the British Library, Dartmouth College, and the Burchfield Art Center in Buffalo, New York. This collection consists exclusively of photographs taken by Charles Harris Whitaker in 1923 of the barns for which Lankes prepared woodcuts.
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