Henry Keller
About the artist:
Keller, (American 1869 – 1949) a leading painter in Cleveland, was born at sea, off Nova Scotia on April 3, 1869. His earliest training was in Karlsruhe, Germany under Hermann Baisch (1846-1894), then at the Cleveland School of Art, the Cincinnati Fine Arts Academy and the Art Students League in New York. The young artist was an apprentice at the W. J. Morgan Lithograph Company, also in Cleveland. Keller completed his art instruction at the Munich Academy (1899-1902) with Heinrich Johann Zügel (1850-1941), chiefly an animal painter.
At the end of his stay in Munich, he won a silver medal. His watercolor, Santa Maria della Salute, in a private collection, is in the tradition of John Singer Sargent. Keller was back in Munich in 1904-05, and he mentioned a painting called Storm-frightened Animals (Weimer, 1940, pp. 570-572). In Munich, Keller also met William Sommer, a future Cleveland post-impressionist.
Back in America, Keller immediately found a job at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh then he taught at his alma mater, the Cleveland School of Art until 1945. Charles Burchfield, one of his more famous students, studied at the Cleveland School of Art between 1912 and 1916, when Keller was studying Asian art and showing modernist tendencies, having surpassed Impressionism. Also at that time, Keller exhibited two works at the groundbreaking Armory Show in New York City. Keller was part of a group called the Cleveland Independents.
Henry G. Keller (American 1869 – 1949)
Price - $3,250
The list of Keller’s exhibition activities is impressive — from local venues in Cleveland to Chicago (including a special show of his wash drawings in May of 1920), Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, his works were on view year by year. The Cleveland Museum of Art presented him with awards on numerous occasions and in 1939, he was elected to the National Academy of Design. That year, his painting Circus Day was on display at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, while at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, his Horse Barn appeared in the exhibition of contemporary artists. The Whitney Museum has Keller’s charcoal and watercolor, Bird Rock, California (1925). Keller died in San Diego, on August 3, 1949.