Albert Herman Schmidt, “Untitled,” Oil on Canvas, c. Early 20th Century

Painting

This is a river scene painted in orange, green, yellow, and brown. The point of view is looking town and toward the river through a screen of trees and brush. In the foreground, trees and dense foliage are thickly painted. The foremost trees are saplings whose tops extend beyond the top of the canvas. Behind them is a thicket of shorter trees. A small light-colored brushstroke near the center in the top third of the background delineates the glimmer of a river beyond. A hill gently rises behind the river. The sky is dark and cloudy, but further out the clouds are lighter.

This Schmidt painting was donated to the gallery in 2016 by the family of Mabel Etnyre Mather.

14 3/4 x 11 1/4″

(1883-1957)

Albert Herman Schmidt was born in Chicago. He studied painting at the Art Institute with Charles Francis Browne and J. H. Vanderpoel. Schmidt is believed to have first visited the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony as a student of Browne. Later he studied in Paris at the Julian Academy. He joined the Chicago Society of Artists and won several awards for pieces he exhibited in the Society of Western Artists. Locally, he was a friend of the Van Inwegin family whose home on the west side of the river adjoined Stronghold on the south. The family maintained a close relationship with the Eagle’s Nest Camp, visiting back and forth across the river by boat. By the 1920s, he was living in the southwest, where he was an early Santa Fe art colony member.

If you look around the gallery, you will see several Schmidt paintings. His work is also featured in the Albuquerque Museum, the Museum of New Mexico, the American Embassy at the Vatican, and at the Embassy in Prague.