1906 (ca.), Albert Lorey Groll, No-Man's Land, Arizona -- American University Museum (Washington)
From the museum label:
Born in New York to German immigrant parents, Groll traveled to Europe as a young adult for artistic training at the Royal Academy in Munich, followed by lessons at the Royal Academy, Antwerp. After time on his own in London and perhaps Paris, he returned to New York in 1890. His paintings of the American Southwest in the early twentieth century made his reputation.
Groll first traveled to the Southwest in the summer of 1904 with Stewart Culin (1858-1929), a noted ethnologist. Captivated by the sparse, heat-drenched landscape, he made paintings in the summer of 1906 that led to a year of considerable attention--a one-man exhibition at the Schaus Gallery in New York, a major prize for Arizona from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and an invitation to exhibit at the First Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Contemporary American Artists, which opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on February 6, 1907.
A critic for the Minneapolis Journal captures the excitement of critics and collectors for his interpretation of the low, flat horizon and infinite space of the Sonoran Desert, so different from earlier Western landscapes like those by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). He admired Groll's use of color and the sense of motion he gave his clouds as they hovered over the still desert terrain. The critic was struck, too, by the uniquely "Americanness" of Groll's imagery. "He is doing for those plains what Corot, Rousseau, and Millet did for the Fontainebleau-Barbizon fields and forests of France."
1906 (ca.), Albert Lorey Groll, No-Man's Land, Arizona -- American University Museum (Washington)
From the museum label:
Born in New York to German immigrant parents, Groll traveled to Europe as a young adult for artistic training at the Royal Academy in Munich, followed by lessons at the Royal Academy, Antwerp. After time on his own in London and perhaps Paris, he returned to New York in 1890. His paintings of the American Southwest in the early twentieth century made his reputation.
Groll first traveled to the Southwest in the summer of 1904 with Stewart Culin (1858-1929), a noted ethnologist. Captivated by the sparse, heat-drenched landscape, he made paintings in the summer of 1906 that led to a year of considerable attention--a one-man exhibition at the Schaus Gallery in New York, a major prize for Arizona from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and an invitation to exhibit at the First Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Contemporary American Artists, which opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on February 6, 1907.
A critic for the Minneapolis Journal captures the excitement of critics and collectors for his interpretation of the low, flat horizon and infinite space of the Sonoran Desert, so different from earlier Western landscapes like those by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). He admired Groll's use of color and the sense of motion he gave his clouds as they hovered over the still desert terrain. The critic was struck, too, by the uniquely "Americanness" of Groll's imagery. "He is doing for those plains what Corot, Rousseau, and Millet did for the Fontainebleau-Barbizon fields and forests of France."