Albert Herman Schmidt, “View of the Rock River from the Artist Colony,” Oil on Canvas, c. 1910

Photograph of a painting.

A representation of the Rock River and surrounding landscape. The river is central to the composition, though viewed from a higher vantage. This painting documents the river views that lured Chicago-based artists to the Eagle’s Nest campsite. Slender-trunked trees and foliage, painted in visibly thick brush strokes, shade the foreground. The leaves on the trees are mostly green, but the shrubby foliage uses a good deal of orange and yellow.

12 1/4 x 14 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.