Karl Albert Buehr Art

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) Giverny Landscape Oil on board, c. 1910 Unsigned Condition: Excellent Image size: 5 7/8 x 7 1/8 inches Frame: 11-1/2 x 12-3/4 x 1-1/2" Provenance: Estat...

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) Strolling in the Park Oil on canvas, relined, c. 1910 Unsigned Provenance: Gift of the Artist to his wife, Mary Hess Beuhr The artist's niece, daughter of Will Hess David Saltzman Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago, exhibited 1994 Karl Albert Buehr at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago Exhibition dates The exhibition was held in 1994 at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 715 North Franklin Street, Chicago. Surviving provenance records describe it as the gallery’s first exhibition at its North Franklin Street location. Works documented as included include Woman on a Patio, Rocky Inlet (France), and apparently other paintings and studies acquired through David Saltzman from the family of Buehr’s wife, Mary Hess Buehr. The 1994 Karl Albert Buehr exhibition at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art represented an important act of historical recovery. Although Buehr enjoyed considerable recognition during his lifetime—as an exhibiting painter, prizewinner, and influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—his reputation had become less visible in the decades following his death. By bringing together paintings and works on paper that had descended through the artist’s family, the Adams exhibition helped restore Buehr to his proper position among the leading exponents of American Impressionism and the most important Chicago-trained painters working in France before the First World War. Giverny was crucial to Buehr’s mature development. American painters had been drawn to the Norman village since the late 1880s, attracted both by Monet’s presence and by the region’s gardens, river valleys, cultivated fields, and distinctive northern light. Buehr did not simply imitate Monet. His figure compositions remained grounded in the academic training he received in Chicago and Paris, but he enlivened that structure with broken brushwork, heightened complementary color, and an increasingly luminous palette. His characteristic compositions place elegantly dressed young women on terraces, beside windows, or within flowering gardens. These figures are neither conventional society portraits nor anonymous decorative accessories. They occupy a carefully balanced space between individual presence and pictorial harmony. Faces and gestures are often quietly observed, while dresses, parasols, flowers, foliage, and shifting sunlight become vehicles for color. Lavender shadows, rose and coral fabrics, emerald foliage, and brilliant passages of yellow or blue transform the garden into a chromatic environment surrounding the sitter. Works associated with the Adams exhibition illuminate the breadth of Buehr’s French production. The pastel Woman on a Patio, circa 1915, demonstrates his ability to translate Impressionist color into the immediacy of a dry medium. Pastel allowed him to place one hue directly beside another without losing intensity. The resulting surface possesses a soft atmospheric unity while retaining the energy of individual strokes. The work’s history—gifted by Buehr to Mary Hess Buehr and subsequently descending through her family—also gives it a particularly intimate character. Rocky Inlet (France) presents another aspect of Buehr’s practice. In place of the cultivated garden and poised female figure, the artist confronts a rugged coastal landscape. Yet his essential concern remains light acting upon color. Rock, water, and vegetation are constructed through abbreviated touches rather than continuous modeling. The small scale suggests direct observation, possibly an outdoor study made during Buehr’s travels in Normandy. Its provenance likewise begins with Mary Hess Buehr and passes through the family before reaching David Saltzman and Robert Henry Adams Fine Art. This family provenance was central to the significance of the 1994 exhibition. The works had not merely circulated anonymously through the market; many retained a direct association with the artist’s household. Such a group could include informal studies, experimental compositions, and personal gifts that Buehr elected to keep rather than send to public exhibitions. Together they offered a more private and exploratory view of his career. Condition: relined canvas and cleaned Image/Canvas size: 10 x 9 inches Frame: 16-3/4 x 15-3/4 x 1-3/4 inches Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952): France and the Giverny Years Karl Albert Buehr—whose surname is sometimes misspelled “Beuhr”—was a German-born American painter and influential teacher associated with the second generation of American Impressionists working at Giverny. Although his artistic identity was rooted in Chicago, the years he spent in France transformed his palette, subject matter, and approach to painting. Born on February 14, 1866, in Feuerbach, near Stuttgart, Buehr immigrated with his family to Chicago, probably in 1881. After working briefly for a commercial lithographer, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1888. He studied with John H. Vanderpoel and graduated with honors in 1894, after which the school invited him to teach. He also served in the Illinois cavalry during the Spanish-American War and married Mary Guion Hess, one of his students and an accomplished artist in her own right. Early study in Europe Buehr’s European education unfolded in several stages. Around 1900 he settled in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian, principally under the French painter Raphaël Collin. Collin was known for idealized female figures placed in luminous outdoor settings, a combination of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist light that anticipated Buehr’s mature work. Buehr reportedly received a gold medal at the Académie in 1901. His early European paintings included portraits, landscapes, and scenes of rural labor. Visits to Holland exposed him to the restrained tonalism of the Hague School, while his travels in Italy—particularly Taormina, Sicily, during 1906 and 1907—encouraged a brighter response to Mediterranean sunlight. He also studied in London, where his contacts with Frank Brangwyn and the decorative currents of British painting strengthened his interest in broad design, rhythmic composition, and large arrangements of figures. A decisive factor in this extended European residence was the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1906 until 1913, Ward provided Buehr with a monthly stipend, enabling the artist, his wife, and their children to remain abroad and pursue their work without the immediate pressures of the American market. Buehr at Giverny Buehr entered the Anglo-American artistic community at Giverny around 1909, probably through his friendship with Henry Salem Hubbell, another American figure painter supported by Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1909 through 1912, Buehr generally spent winters in Paris and the warmer months at Giverny. In 1912 and the summer of 1913, the family reportedly lived at Sainte-Geneviève-lès-Gasny, close to Giverny. By this date Giverny was no longer merely the village in which Claude Monet lived. It had become an international artists’ colony, particularly attractive to American painters who admired Impressionist color but wished to retain firm drawing and carefully organized figure compositions. Buehr’s associates included Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard Edward Miller, Guy Rose, Lawton Parker, Louis Ritman, Edmund Greacen, Karl Anderson, and Theodore Earl Butler. Buehr was especially close to the circle of Frieseke and Miller. These artists specialized in decorative paintings of fashionably dressed women reading, sewing, taking tea, or resting in sunlit gardens. Their figures were surrounded by flowers, patterned fabrics, parasols, and flickering passages of colored light. Buehr adopted this repertoire, but his paintings usually retained a stronger structural organization and a more assertive contrast between complementary colors. During his first months at Giverny, Buehr worked on a large decorative panel of dancing figures. The composition received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1910, an important professional recognition. That summer, however, he increasingly turned toward intimate garden scenes and outdoor figure studies. The influence of Richard Miller can be detected in the decorative arrangement of the figures, while Frieseke’s example encouraged Buehr s use of brilliant sunlight, patterned surfaces, and saturated hues. Relationship with Claude Monet Claude Monet was Buehr’s artistic hero, but the extent of their personal relationship should not be overstated. Buehr’s children played with the children of Theodore Butler, Monet’s son-in-law, and they visited the Monet household. Buehr’s daughter Kathleen later recalled that Monet was gracious to the children. Nevertheless, the best available scholarship suggests that no close personal association between Buehr and Monet has been documented. Monet’s importance to Buehr was therefore primarily artistic. At Giverny, Buehr learned to regard colored light as a central subject rather than merely a means of describing objects. Shadows became violet, blue, or green; white dresses reflected the surrounding garden; and faces and arms were modeled through small strokes of warm and cool color. The enclosed garden also became a kind of outdoor studio in which human figures, flowers, fabrics, and sunlight could be orchestrated into a unified decorative design. The Giverny style Buehr became best known for paintings of young women seated or standing in gardens, often accompanied by colorful parasols. Works such as Springtime in Giverny, Under the Parasol, and related pictures of women reading or conversing exemplify his mature style. Although inspired by French Impressionism, these paintings are not spontaneous transcriptions of fleeting visual experience in the strict Monet tradition. They are carefully staged figure compositions. Buehr himself explained that the outdoor figure painter should concentrate upon the ensemble—grouping, arrangement, and color—rather than laboriously describing every feature. This principle helps distinguish his Giverny paintings...

Karl Albert Beuhr (1866-1952) Giverny Landscape Oil on relined canvas, c. 1912 Signed lower right: K A Buehr Condition: Canvas relined for support Image size: 13 1/4 x 15 3/8 inches Frame size: 19 5/8 x 21 7/8 inches Provenance: Gift of the artist to his wife, Mary Hess Beuhr The artist's niece, daughter of Will Hess Buehr David Saltzman Robert Henry Adams Thomas French Fine Art Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Horner, Canton, Ohio Exhibited: Canton Museum of Art, Impressionism: An American View, 1983, label on verso Karl Albert Buehr at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago Exhibition dates The exhibition was held in 1994 at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 715 North Franklin Street, Chicago. Surviving provenance records describe it as the gallery’s first exhibition at its North Franklin Street location. Works documented as included include Woman on a Patio, Rocky Inlet (France), and apparently other paintings and studies acquired through David Saltzman from the family of Buehr’s wife, Mary Hess Buehr. The 1994 Karl Albert Buehr exhibition at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art represented an important act of historical recovery. Although Buehr enjoyed considerable recognition during his lifetime—as an exhibiting painter, prizewinner, and influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—his reputation had become less visible in the decades following his death. By bringing together paintings and works on paper that had descended through the artist’s family, the Adams exhibition helped restore Buehr to his proper position among the leading exponents of American Impressionism and the most important Chicago-trained painters working in France before the First World War. Giverny was crucial to Buehr’s mature development. American painters had been drawn to the Norman village since the late 1880s, attracted both by Monet’s presence and by the region’s gardens, river valleys, cultivated fields, and distinctive northern light. Buehr did not simply imitate Monet. His figure compositions remained grounded in the academic training he received in Chicago and Paris, but he enlivened that structure with broken brushwork, heightened complementary color, and an increasingly luminous palette. His characteristic compositions place elegantly dressed young women on terraces, beside windows, or within flowering gardens. These figures are neither conventional society portraits nor anonymous decorative accessories. They occupy a carefully balanced space between individual presence and pictorial harmony. Faces and gestures are often quietly observed, while dresses, parasols, flowers, foliage, and shifting sunlight become vehicles for color. Lavender shadows, rose and coral fabrics, emerald foliage, and brilliant passages of yellow or blue transform the garden into a chromatic environment surrounding the sitter. Works associated with the Adams exhibition illuminate the breadth of Buehr’s French production. The pastel Woman on a Patio, circa 1915, demonstrates his ability to translate Impressionist color into the immediacy of a dry medium. Pastel allowed him to place one hue directly beside another without losing intensity. The resulting surface possesses a soft atmospheric unity while retaining the energy of individual strokes. The work’s history—gifted by Buehr to Mary Hess Buehr and subsequently descending through her family—also gives it a particularly intimate character. Rocky Inlet (France) presents another aspect of Buehr’s practice. In place of the cultivated garden and poised female figure, the artist confronts a rugged coastal landscape. Yet his essential concern remains light acting upon color. Rock, water, and vegetation are constructed through abbreviated touches rather than continuous modeling. The small scale suggests direct observation, possibly an outdoor study made during Buehr’s travels in Normandy. Its provenance likewise begins with Mary Hess Buehr and passes through the family before reaching David Saltzman and Robert Henry Adams Fine Art. This family provenance was central to the significance of the 1994 exhibition. The works had not merely circulated anonymously through the market; many retained a direct association with the artist’s household. Such a group could include informal studies, experimental compositions, and personal gifts that Buehr elected to keep rather than send to public exhibitions. Together they offered a more private and exploratory view of his career. Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952): France and the Giverny Years Karl Albert Buehr—whose surname is sometimes misspelled “Beuhr”—was a German-born American painter and influential teacher associated with the second generation of American Impressionists working at Giverny. Although his artistic identity was rooted in Chicago, the years he spent in France transformed his palette, subject matter, and approach to painting. Born on February 14, 1866, in Feuerbach, near Stuttgart, Buehr immigrated with his family to Chicago, probably in 1881. After working briefly for a commercial lithographer, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1888. He studied with John H. Vanderpoel and graduated with honors in 1894, after which the school invited him to teach. He also served in the Illinois cavalry during the Spanish-American War and married Mary Guion Hess, one of his students and an accomplished artist in her own right. Early study in Europe Buehr’s European education unfolded in several stages. Around 1900 he settled in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian, principally under the French painter Raphaël Collin. Collin was known for idealized female figures placed in luminous outdoor settings, a combination of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist light that anticipated Buehr’s mature work. Buehr reportedly received a gold medal at the Académie in 1901. His early European paintings included portraits, landscapes, and scenes of rural labor. Visits to Holland exposed him to the restrained tonalism of the Hague School, while his travels in Italy—particularly Taormina, Sicily, during 1906 and 1907—encouraged a brighter response to Mediterranean sunlight. He also studied in London, where his contacts with Frank Brangwyn and the decorative currents of British painting strengthened his interest in broad design, rhythmic composition, and large arrangements of figures. A decisive factor in this extended European residence was the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1906 until 1913, Ward provided Buehr with a monthly stipend, enabling the artist, his wife, and their children to remain abroad and pursue their work without the immediate pressures of the American market. Buehr at Giverny Buehr entered the Anglo-American artistic community at Giverny around 1909, probably through his friendship with Henry Salem Hubbell, another American figure painter supported by Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1909 through 1912, Buehr generally spent winters in Paris and the warmer months at Giverny. In 1912 and the summer of 1913, the family reportedly lived at Sainte-Geneviève-lès-Gasny, close to Giverny. By this date Giverny was no longer merely the village in which Claude Monet lived. It had become an international artists’ colony, particularly attractive to American painters who admired Impressionist color but wished to retain firm drawing and carefully organized figure compositions. Buehr’s associates included Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard Edward Miller, Guy Rose, Lawton Parker, Louis Ritman, Edmund Greacen, Karl Anderson, and Theodore Earl Butler. Buehr was especially close to the circle of Frieseke and Miller. These artists specialized in decorative paintings of fashionably dressed women reading, sewing, taking tea, or resting in sunlit gardens. Their figures were surrounded by flowers, patterned fabrics, parasols, and flickering passages of colored light. Buehr adopted this repertoire, but his paintings usually retained a stronger structural organization and a more assertive contrast between complementary colors. During his first months at Giverny, Buehr worked on a large decorative panel of dancing figures. The composition received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1910, an important professional recognition. That summer, however, he increasingly turned toward intimate garden scenes and outdoor figure studies. The influence of Richard Miller can be detected in the decorative arrangement of the figures, while Frieseke’s example encouraged Buehr s use of brilliant sunlight, patterned surfaces, and saturated hues. Relationship with Claude Monet Claude Monet was Buehr’s artistic hero, but the extent of their personal relationship should not be overstated. Buehr’s children played with the children of Theodore Butler, Monet’s son-in-law, and they visited the Monet household. Buehr’s daughter Kathleen later recalled that Monet was gracious to the children. Nevertheless, the best available scholarship suggests that no close personal association between Buehr and Monet has been documented. Monet’s importance to Buehr was therefore primarily artistic. At Giverny, Buehr learned to regard colored light as a central subject rather than merely a means of describing objects. Shadows became violet, blue, or green; white dresses reflected the surrounding garden; and faces and arms were modeled through small strokes of warm and cool color. The enclosed garden also became a kind of outdoor studio in which human figures, flowers, fabrics, and sunlight could be orchestrated into a unified decorative design. The Giverny style Buehr became best known for paintings of young women seated or standing in gardens, often accompanied by colorful parasols. Works such as Springtime in Giverny, Under the Parasol, and related pictures of women reading or conversing exemplify his mature style. Although inspired by French Impressionism, these paintings are not spontaneous transcriptions of fleeting visual experience in the strict Monet tradition. They are carefully staged figure compositions. Buehr himself explained that the outdoor figure painter should concentrate upon the ensemble—grouping, arrangement, and color—rather than laboriously describing every feature. This principle helps distinguish his Giverny paintings...

American Impressionist Genre Figure Oil on Canvas Framed in gold leaf frame Excellent condition signed "K.A. Buehr" lower left Exhibited 24th Annual Exhibition, Art Institute...

Woman on a Patio Pastel on paper, c. 1915 Unsigned Provenance: Gift of the artist to his wife, Mary Hess Buehr By decent to the artist's niece, daughter of Will Hess David Saltzman Robert Henry Adams Fine Art Thomas French Fine Art Ronald C. Sloter, Columbus, Ohio Columbus College of Art and Design (de-accessed) Exhibited at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 1994, the first exhibition at the North Franklin Street Gallery. One of the early Chicago artists to adopt Impressionism, Karl Buehr became a figure and landscape painter. As a figure painter, his specialty became "gorgeously colored images of young women on porches overlooking brilliant summertime gardens." (Kennedy 98) His later work often showed a female figure with serious expression engaging the viewer with a direct stare. In his landscapes, he was noted for his strong coloration. In a December 1896 student exhibition at the Art Institute, a reviewer for the "Chicago Times Herald" described Buehr's landscapes as "blithe and joyous" with "country roads brilliant in sunlight . . . fields rich in summer verdure, under soft skies painted in a high, musical key." (Gerdts 68) Buehr was born as one of seven sons to a prosperous German family who immigrated to America and settled in Chicago in 1869. He was first exposed to his signature style of Impressionism in 1888 when he enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute while working in the shipping department of a lithographic firm near the Institute. He remained a student there until 1897 and was recognized in a "Chicago Times Herald" editorial of June 13, 1897 as one of the Institute's most outstanding pupils. The next year, his art career was temporarily put on hold when he briefly enlisted with the U.S. Army in the Spanish American War. In 1899, he resumed his art studies, this time with Frank Duveneck. He exhibited a painting at the Paris Salon of 1900. In 1905, thanks to a wealthy Chicago patron, Buehr and his family moved to France. They spent the following year in Taormina, Sicily, and spent time in Venice as well. In Paris, Buehr studied at the Academy Julian with Raphael Collin for two years. Then he went to England, enrolling in the London Art School but had returned to Paris by 1908. During this time, he began painting at Giverny, the home of Impressionist leader Claude Monet (1840-1926, and by 1912, Buehr was listing that village as his home address. One of his good friends and associates at Giverny was Frederick Frieseke. One of Buehr's paintings from that time, "News from Home", was exhibited in 1913 at the French Salon in Paris and at the annual exhibit of the Chicago Art Institute. It shows a woman in floral dress sitting on a porch with a background with potted flowers and lush greenery background. Of his painting done at Giverny, Buehr wrote in 1912 to William Macbeth of Macbeth Galleries in New York: "My figures painted in and around Giverny are costumed and in appropriate out door settings." (Gerdts 68) In 1914, he returned to the United States and took a teaching position in Chicago at the Art Institute, which he held for the remainder of his life. He was married to Mary Hess, a painter of miniatures and decorative works. In 1928-29, he was a guest artist at Stanford University. Courtesy, AskArt “Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952) was a painter born in Germany. Buehr was born in Feuerbach - near Stuttgart. He was the son of Frederick Buehr and Henrietta Doh (Dohna?). He moved to Chicago with his parents and siblings in the 1880s. In Chicago, young Karl worked at various jobs until he was employed by a lithograph company near the Art Institute of Chicago. Introduced to art at work, Karl paid regular visits to the Art Institute, where he found part-time employment, enabling him to enroll in night classes. Later, working at the Institute as a night watchman, he had a unique opportunity to study the masters and actually posted sketchings that blended in favorably with student's work. Having studied under John H. Vanderpoel, Buehr graduated with honors, while his work aroused such admiration that he was offered a teaching post there, which he maintained for many years thereafter. He graduated from the Art Inst. of Chicago and served in the IL Cav in the Spanish–American War. Mary Hess became Karl's wife—she was a student of his and an accomplished artist in her own right. In 1922, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member. Art Studies in Europe In 1904, Buehr received a bronze medal at the St. Louis Universal Exposition, then, in 1905, Buehr and his family moved to France, thanks to a wealthy Chicago patron, and they spent the following year in Taormina, Sicily, where the artist painted local subjects, executing both genre subjects and landscapes as well as time in Venice. Buehr spent at least some time in Paris, where he worked with Raphaël Collin at the Académie Julian. Giverny and American Impressionism Prior to this time, Buehr had developed a quasi-impressionistic style, but after 1909, when he began spending summers near Monet in Giverny, his work became decidedly characteristic of that plein-air style but he began focusing on female subjects posed out-of-doors. He remained for some time in Giverny, and here he became well-acquainted with other well known expatriate America impressionists such as Richard Miller, Theodore Earl Butler, Frederick Frieseke, and Lawton Parker. It seems likely that Buehr met Monet, since his own daughter Kathleen and Monet’s granddaughter, Lili Butler, were playmates, according to George Buehr, the painter’s son. His other daughter Lydia died before adulthood due to diabetes. He returned to Chicago at the onset of World War I and taught at The Art Inst for many years. One of his noted pupils at the Art Institute was Archibald Motley...

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) untitled (Woman by the Windows) (Mary, the Artist's wife) Unsigned. Pastel on board, c. 1915 Created while the artist was in Giverny, France Provenance...

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) Rocky Inlet (France) Oil on canvas, relined, c. 1912 Signed: K A Buehr, lower right (see photo) Created during the artist's time in Giverny and Normandy...

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) Woman on a Patio (The Artist's Wife Mary Hess Buehr) Pastel on paper, c. 1915 Condition: Excellent, Archival frame with silk matting Image size: 9 7/8 x...

Description Karl Albert Buehr (American, 1866-1952) Sisterly Advice, circa 1913 oil on canvas signed KA Buehr (lower left) 60 x 50 inches. Exhibited: Paris,Salon des Artistes Franca...