Karl Albert Buehr

Karl Buehr’s contribution to American Impressionism has long been recognized through his colorful landscapes and vibrant figurative paintings completed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Buehr was born in 1866 to a prosperous German family that moved to America and settled in Chicago in 1881. After briefly working with a commercial lithographer, Buehr began his formal art training in 1888 at the city’s prestigious School of the Art Institute. In 1894, after graduating with honors, Buehr was invited by his alma mater to instruct classes at the School. He would continue to work and study at the Art Institute through 1897.

After serving in the army during the Spanish American War, Buehr and his wife, fellow artist Mary Guion Hess, traveled to London, where Buehr studied with the influential American painter Frank Duveneck. In 1900, Buehr settled in Paris, where he studied at the Academie Julian. The following year he earned a gold medal for his work at the Academie. For most of the next decade Buehr traveled and painted in Europe, notably becoming involved with the important American artist community in Giverny, France. At the onset of World War I in 1914, Buehr returned to the United States, settling again in Chicago and to a teaching position at the Art Institute. He continued to paint in Chicago; Taos, New Mexico; Windsor, Vermont and elsewhere in the United States.

Buehr’s work has been included in many important exhibitions, including the 1904 Universal Exposition, St. Louis; the Societe des Artists Francais, Paris (1910); the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 107th Annual Exhibition, Philadelphia (1912); the Exposition Annuelle d’Art Moderne, Galerie Walker, Paris (1912), and at numerous exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, among other notable museums and galleries.

Paintings by Karl Buehr are represented in the collections of the Union League Club, Chicago; the University of Chicago, Chicago; the Historical Museum of Des Moines, Des Moines, Iowa; the John H. Vanderpoel Art Association, Chicago; the Hamilton Club, Chicago; Northwestern University, Evanston; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York and the Evanston Woman’s Club, Evanston, among others.