page_title: Albert Henry Krehbiel
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Henry Krehbiel / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Santa Fe Horseman
context_page_description: Albert Henry Krehbiel, was the most decorated American painter ever at the French Academy, winning the Prix De Rome, four Gold Medals and five cash prizes. He was born in Denmark, Iowa and taught, lived and worked for many years in Chicago. His masterpiece is the programme of eleven decorative wall and two ceiling paintings / murals for the Supreme and Appellate Court Rooms in Springfield, Illinois. Although educated as a realist in Paris, which is reflected in his neoclassical mural works, he is most famously known as an American Impressionist. Later in his career, Krehbiel experimented in a more modernist manner.
context_section_description: Born in Denmark, Iowa, in 1873. In 1879, he moved with his family to Newton, Kansas, where his father was a prominent Mennonite layman, prosperous carriage and buggy maker, and later a co-founder of Bethel College. In the summer of 1898, Krehbiel made his way from Newton to Chicago by bicycle with his younger brother, Fred, and enrolled at The Art Institute for the fall semester. Albert Henry Krehbiel became a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in 1902, he was granted an American Traveling Scholarship to study abroad. In 1903, he began his three years of study at the Académie Julian in Paris under history painter and muralist Jean-Paul Laurens.; Krehbiel won four gold medals at the Académie Julian (the only American ever to have done so)  as well as the coveted Prix de Rome. In 1905, he received the esteemed honor of having two of his neoclassical works selected by jury for the annual exhibition organized by the Société des Artistes Français in Paris (also known as the Paris Salon).
  Returning to the United States, Krehbiel was commissioned to design and paint the mural for the wall of the Chicago Juvenile Court in 1906. In 1907, he was unanimously awarded the commission in a national competition to design and paint the eleven wall and two ceiling murals for the Supreme and Appellate Court Rooms of the Illinois Supreme Court Building in Springfield, the state's capital. Begun in 1907, the final Supreme Court Building mural was completed and installed in 1911. Mr. W. Carby Zimmerman, architect of the building, considered the work done by Krehbiel to be "an example of the best mural painting ever executed in the West."
  In 1918 and 1919, Krehbiel spent his summers at art colonies in Santa Monica, California, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 1920 through 1923, he spent summers exclusively in Santa Fe as an exhibiting member of the Santa Fe Art Colony. In the summers of 1922 and 1923, Krehbiel was invited by the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe to participate in its Visiting Artists Program and was given a studio in the prestigious Palace of the Governors next to his contemporary, Ashcan realist Robert Henri.
  Krehbiel had associations and exhibitions with the other artists of the Santa Fe Art Colony—and the Taos Society of Artists—such as George Bellows and Gustave Baumann (exhibition in McPherson, Kansas, 1918), and Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, Marsden Hartley, and Sheldon Parsons (exhibition in El Paso, Texas, 1920). Other notable artists that Krehbiel exhibited with during this period include William Victor Higgins, Ernest L. Blumenschein, John French Sloan, Raymond Jonson, and Stuart Davis.
  Krehbiel was a member of the faculty at the Art Institute of Chicago for 39 years and at the Armour Institute of Technology (later Illinois Institute of Technology after merging with the Lewis Institute) for 32 years. In 1926, he helped pioneer the Chicago Art Institute Summer School of Painting (later named Ox-Bow) in Saugatuck, Michigan, where he spent most of his remaining summers teaching and painting. In 1934, Krehbiel opened his own summer school of art in Saugatuck called the AK Studio  When able to break away from his students, he would capture the surrounding rolling hills and the Kalamazoo River in oil, watercolor, and pastel. He would often visit Saugatuck in winters to portray the area in its vast and billowing cover of snow.
caption: Santa Fe Horseman
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