Gunnar Widforss was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1879. He studied to be a muralist at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1896-1900. In search of landscape subjects, he traveled extensively in Russia, Europe and Africa gaining popular acclaim particularly among European royalty who became important patrons of his earlier works. He remained in Sweden until 1921 by which time he had become a premier figure in the art world. While en route to the Orient in 1921, Widforss visited San Francisco and opted to remain.

In 1922 Stephen T. Mather, the director of the national parks, influenced Widforss to make painting America’s national parks his specialty. He did just that, and in 1923 illustrated the book “Songs of Yosemite.” Many national magazines used his paintings for their covers and his fame in America grew rapidly. He painted the canyons of the Colorado and Yellowstone, Zion and Bryce canyons, the Kaibob forest at Mesa Verde, Taos and Crater Lake but his first love was the Grand Canyon. It was his obsession with the Grand Canyon that prompted him to become an American citizen. He built a studio on the rim of the Grand Canyon and spent his last years there, studying geological formations and painting the beauty that he saw. The paintings from these last years were called “the finest to have come out of the West” and are still highly sought after today. Widforss died on the rim of his beloved canyon at the age of fifty-five and was buried there.

He was a member of the California Watercolor Society and the Scandinavian-American Artists. His works are held by many important private collections throughout the world and can be viewed at the Yosemite National Park Museum and the Museum of Northern Arizona which held a retrospective of his works in 1969.

Frank Paul Sauerwein was born in 1871 and raised in Philadelphia, the pupil of his father, Charles D. Sauerwein, a portraitist and genre painter who studied in Europe. Frank Sauerwein first studied at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art, then at the Pennsylvania Academy, and finally at the Art Institute of Chicago. Sauerwein moved to Denver about 1891 because of ill health. In 1893 he began to sketch Indians in the Rockies. Within two years his subjects were mostly western landscapes and Indian life. He was in Colorado Springs in 1893, traveling with Charles Craig to the Ute Reservation. After a trip to France and Spain, he returned West, visiting Taos in 1899, Santa Cruz and Santa Fe in 1900, and Taos in 1902 and 1903. Next he resided in California for a brief time. Then in 1906 he moved to Taos where he purchased a house and lived for two years. Stricken by tuberculosis and too ill to paint, he went to Connecticut to find a cure.

Sauerwein was an important painter in the West during his time. He painted both oils and watercolors and favored naturalistic, tightly drawn landscapes, which are at the same time atmospheric and even lyric. He was known as a competent, straightforward naturalistic recorder of the landscape and Indian life. Frank Sauerwein died a young man in his late thirties in 1910 in Stamford, Connecticut.

John Koch, born in Toledo, Ohio in 1909, was an American realist best known for his paintings of fashionable Manhattan and New England mansion dwellers. Koch’s early art training was minimal. He attended two summers at the artists’ colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he was influenced by the work and theory of Charles Hawthorne.

After graduating from high school, he went to Paris, where he stayed for four years painting on his own, never under a teacher. As he later recalled, “the Louvre taught me my major lessons.” At a time when the world seemed to turn its back on the realist tradition, Koch persisted and presented intimate views of his personal world.

His paintings are populated with models, musicians, views of his studio, and his own elegant fourteen-room apartment facing Central Park West in New York City. In defense of his seemingly “upper-crust” subject matter, Koch once stated, “I have great affection for … dishonored subject matter … [because of] the arbitrary … way in which it has been dismissed. Have (sic) the sensuous, the lyrical elements really been expelled from modern life? Of course not; is modern man exclusively occupied with his own tragic plight, his neuroses, and his destruction? This … is as much the sentimentality of our day as was the sweetness and light for which we so tirelessly berate the Victorians.”

Although Koch is generally viewed as a painter of the rich and famous, he was not just a superficial ‘society painter’; as Koch himself stated, “I am quite visibly a realist, occupied essentially with human beings, the environments they create, and their relationships.”

His style is akin to the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer, evoking quiet, intimate interiors, and creating luminous effects by under painting in egg tempera and glazing with oils. Koch’s compositions were elegant. His warm tones and colors invited you into his world where, as you investigate the contents, you discover treasures amongst his beautifully observed subjects.

Member:
National Academy of Design, NYC
Audubon Artists Century Association
Lotus Club Royal Society of Art (Benjamin Franklin Fellow)

Public Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago
Art Students League, NYC
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Detroit Institute of Arts
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
National Academy of Design, NYC
Toledo Museum of Art, OH

Oscar Berninghaus was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where he studied art in night classes. While a young man, Berninghaus first visited Taos, New Mexico, where he would later help found the Taos Society of Artists. Berninghaus had trained as an illustrator, and his paintings often have the straight-forward look of his commercial work. He painted without romantic embellishment, preferring to depict the Native Americans as they honestly appeared in day to day, 20th century life.

Born in Holland, Cornelis Botke studied at the Haarlem School for Applied Design before immigrating to the U.S. in 1906. Settling in Chicago, Botke maintained a studio and continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met his future wife, the art student Jessie Arms. In 1919 the Botkes moved to Carmel, California, where Cornelis taught at Carmel Arts and Crafts. Following a tour through Europe, the couple ultimately settled on a ranch in Santa Paula, California, where the couple built a studio they could share.

For more information on this and other artists, please visit the artist index on our gallery website

Charles Arthur Fries was born in Hillsboro, Ohio in 1854 and was apprenticed to a lithographer in Cincinnati at the age of 15. While there he studied at the McMicken Art Academy. In 1887 Fries moved to New York where he enjoyed a successful career in illustration before moving to California in 1896, settling in San Diego. In California, Fries concentrated on his atmospheric land and desertscapes. A prolific artist, Fries is remembered as being a major figure in the early San Diego art scene.

Leon Gaspard was born near Moscow, Russia in 1882 to parents that encouraged his artistic talents and supported his move to Paris to study at the Academie Julian. Gaspard was enthralled by the creative climate that surrounded him there. For several years he studied and showed his works at the Paris Salon. Following a two-year recovery from an airplane accident, Gaspard moved to New York in 1916 where he would live and exhibit for only 2 years before settling in Taos, New Mexico. In Taos, Gaspard was fascinated by the indigenous culture and set about studying and painting it. His vibrant style was rooted in Impressionism and he resisted many Moderist trends.

William Griffith was born in Lawrence, Kansas in 1866 and studied art at Washington University in St. Louis. Griffith also studied at the Academie Julian in Paris before returning to Kansas for a teaching position at Kansas University where he woudl reain for the next 20 years. In 1918, Griffith first visited Southern California, and two years later moved to Laguna Beach where he served as President of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Griffith was captivated by the beauty of his new surroundings and he was a prolific landscape and coastal painter until his death in 1940.

Herman Ottomar Herzog was born in Bremen, Germany, on November 15, 1831. He studied art at the Dusseldorf Academy, starting in 1848, under several classical landscape painters. In 1855, Herzog made his first visit to Norway. The trip was a milestone in Herzog’s career as it exposed him to the rugged landscape of the Norwegian wilderness and instilled in him a lifelong sense of nature that was to show in all his work.

During the late 1850’s and early 1860’s, Herzog’s fame spread throughout Europe. His paintings were collected for their dynamic realism and strong atmospheric effects. Among his patrons were several of Europe’s royal families, including Queen Victoria of England and Grand Duke Alexander of Russia. He exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1863 and 1864, winning an Honorable Mention. While in Paris, it is thought that Herzog came into contact with the popular Barbizon School, whose adherents painted the grandeur and beauty of Nature in a romantic and realistic style. The effect of the Barbizon painters can also be seen in Herzog’s poetic handling of mood and color. Although he was still in Europe, Herzog sent several paintings for exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1863 to 1869. He had several friends in the United States and they were developing a rather good demand for his work.

It is not known exactly when Herzog decided to come to America. Sometime in the late 1860’s he settled in Philadelphia. Besides wanting a developing market for his work, Herzog left Bremen due to rising political agitation by Prussia, which had just absorbed Bremen into its domain. In America, Herzog continued to paint his romantic landscapes, finding the American wilderness well suited to his style. In 1871, he traveled up the Hudson River on a painting tour. In 1873, he took his first trip west, going to Yosemite, then to Wyoming, Oregon, and along the West Coast to the Coronado Island, near the Mexican border. Herzog made several journeys west, finding each trip more fruitful than the last. He became known for his depictions of Yosemite, receiving great acclaim for a fine El Capitan, much in the style of his fellow countryman and painter Albert Bierstadt. His last trip west was in 1905, at the age of 74.

In 1876, Herzog participated in the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, showing a Norwegian scene and a Yosemite landscape, which earned him a Bronze Medal. In 1882, he exhibited two paintings of Pennsylvania at the National Academy Annual Exhibition.

As Herzog grew older, he continued to paint actively. He retained all his control and abilities even into his one hundredth birthday. In 1931, he participated in a gallery exhibition with his son, Lewis Herzog. Herman Herzog died on February 6, 1932, in his home in Philadelphia, at the age of 100.

Called the “Artist of the Yosemite” because of his devotion to that seemingly inexhaustible subject, Thomas Hill was born in Birmingham, England on September 11, 1829. After immigrating to the United States in 1884, Hill settled with his family in Taunton, Massachusetts. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the tutelage of Peter F. Rothermel. Hill painted in Massachusetts throughout the 1850’s and often in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with a group of artists that included Asher B. Durand, George Inness, Benjamin Champney, Albert Bierstadt, Virgil Williams and his brother Edward Hill. For health reasons he was forced to seek a milder climate and, with wife and children, made the overland trek to California in 1861.

After settling in San Francisco, he advertised as a portrait painter and in 1862 made his first trip to Yosemite accompanied by William Keith and Virgil Williams. In 1866 he exhibited Yosemite scenes at the National Academy and later that year journeyed to Paris where he was a pupil of Paul Meyerheim and exhibited at the Universal Expo. Returning to the United States, he stayed in Boston from 1868 to 1970, but returned to San Francisco in 1871 to help organize the San Francisco Art Association.

While his wife maintained the family home in Oakland, Hill built a studio in Yosemite in 1883. This studio was his home for the rest of his life, except for the winter months he spent in San Francisco where he maintained a studio in the Flood Building. When Virgil Williams died in 1886, Hill became interim director of the School of Design until a new director could be found.

During the 1870’s and 1880’s, his work was in demand and brought very high prices; however, during the later part of his life his work did not command the interest that it once had due to changing art styles. Like Bierstadt, his panoramic landscapes were considered old-fashioned and for half a century or more his work was in eclipse. Today his work has regained its proper stature and he is considered a giant in American art. Although he painted over five thousand paintings of Yosemite, he suffered the first of a series of strokes in 1896 that greatly curtailed his artistic output. During the last three years of his life he needed constant care and was unable to paint. His death on June 30, 1908 in Raymond is believed to have been a suicide. Thomas Hill is buried in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery.