George Oberteuffer (1878 - 1940) Excerpted from the Essay by Art Historian Kathleen Kienholz

After three years at Princeton University in the class of 1900, George Oberteuffer decided to follow his passion and began studies at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Under the master William Merritt Chase he gained a respect for the traditional values of drawing and painting. He brought those skills in composition, perspective, and color, adding his own genius as a plein air impressionist to France in 1905. He married a French artist Henriette Amiard and quickly became a active member of the American art community in Paris. A sociétaire of the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, he painted and exhibited scenes of Paris and coastal landscapes of Normandy and Brittany. When the First World War threatened Paris in 1914, he volunteered for the ambulance corps and became a Red Cross volunteer, eventually leading to a commission in the U.S. Army as a captain and senior administrator for relief supplies. Returning to the United States with his wife and two children, Betty and Karl, in 1919, he exhibited his work, often with Henriette, in New York and Chicago and became a popular teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Oberteuffer family travelled to art colonies in Wisconsin, Provincetown and Gloucester, Massachusetts and the Maine coast to paint and teach summer classes. Living in New York in the 1930s, he pro-duced cityscapes like the House of the Rabbi, which won an Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design, to which he was awarded full membership in 1938.