page_title: Leopold Seyffert
section_title: Teaching and career
hierarchical_section_title: Leopold Seyffert / Teaching and career
caption_attribution_description: English: a photo of Leopold Seyffert, Ernest Hemingway, and Maurice Speiser with their families.
context_page_description: Leopold Gould Seyffert was an American artist. Born in California, Missouri and raised as a child in Colorado and then Pittsburgh, his career brought him eventually to New York City, via Philadelphia and Chicago. In New York the dealer Macbeth established him as one of the leading portraitists of the 20th century and his over 500 portraits continue to decorate the galleries, rooms and halls of many of America's museums and institutions.
context_section_description: From 1909 to 1913, he taught at Graphic Sketch Club, Philadelphia, which now is the Samuel S. Fleisher Memorial. In 1910, he won the Cresson Traveling Scholarship, and went to Europe with his fiancée, the painter Helen Fleck, and her mother. In 1911 they married and in 1912, he again won the Cresson Scholarship, allowing them to travel and work in Volendam, Holland. During these years, he met Leopold Stokowski, who became a close friend, and the resulting portrait (below) won the 1913 Fellowship Prize and the Popular Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy annual. Also that year, he won honorable mention at the Carnegie International Exhibition for a Volendam painting, "Tired Out", and he was honored with a special section at Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. During the summer, he painted Robert Walton Goelet’s wife, Elsie Whelen Goelet at Ochre Court in Newport, Rhode Island.
  In 1914, he and Helen and their first child, Mary Louise, summered in Spain where he and friend Waldo Pierce visited Ignacio Zuloaga, and painted colorful people in Segovia, including Daniel Zuloaga. The same year, he was one of three artists in group exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, where he exhibited some of his early masterworks, most of which are in museums today.
  He continued his teaching in 1914–21 at another school, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) in Philadelphia, a school that at the time was managed largely by the Sartain family. In 1915 their second child, Richard (Leopold, Jr.), was born.  That year he won the Gold Medal at the Philadelphia Art Club, and Silver Medal, Panama Pacific Exposition, San Francisco. In 1916 he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design, also winning the Beck Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy, for a portrait of the violinist Fritz Kreisler, now in the National Portrait Gallery. The same year he had solo exhibitions in Boston at St. Botolph Club and Copley Gallery. He summered in Seal Harbor, Maine, (photographed left) with group of Philadelphia artists and musicians where he began series of charcoal portraits of these personalities. He returned to Seal Harbor the following summer where his second son, Peter, was born. In the fall he moved to Chicago and began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (a post he continued to hold until 1927). In December he was in a group exhibit at the Detroit Museum of Art with Karl Anderson, Hayley Lever and Ernest Lawson.
  In 1918 he won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for Lacquer Screen, now in their collection, and also both the Altman and First Hallgarten Prizes at the National Academy of Design. Lacquer Screen is one of many nudes painted of his model and likely mistress at that time, Bobbi, and paintings of her are now in major museum collections, such as the Los Angeles County Museum, Illinois State Museum, High Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. That year he had his second group exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. In 1921 he won the Thomas R. Proctor Prize for portraiture, from the National Academy of Design. Also, his association with the Art Institute of Chicago expanded with his portraits of notable citizens of Chicago included in a circuit show which they organized and sent traveling. It included financiers, artists, musicians and writers living in Chicago at that time, such as Potter Palmer Jr., Frederick Stock, Albin Polasek, and Marshall Field, Jr. In 1922 he had a solo exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1923 he was a founding artist member of the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York and he was chosen in its initial lottery offering with such artists as John Singer Sargent. Soon after he began to maintain a studio in New York and in 1925 Grand Central began representing him in his portrait art.
  Seyffert's sense of humor and congenial manner came from his roots as an immigrant child. He was determined and thoroughly enjoyed the company of his sitters. Even if they wer
caption: Seyffert, Hemingway, and Speiser in Hendaye, France 1931 courtesy The Speiser & Easterling-Hallman Collection of Ernest Hemingway, University of South Carolina Libraries
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