Alfred Henry Maurer

Alfred Henry Maurer was an American modernist painter. He exhibited his work in avantgarde circles internationally and in New York City during the early twentieth century. Highly respected today, his work met with little critical or commercial success in his lifetime, and he died, a suicide, at the age of sixtyfour.

Maurer was born in New York City. He was the son of Germanborn Louis Maurer, a lithographer with a pronounced disdain for modern art. At age sixteen, Maurer had to quit school to work at his fathers lithographic firm. In 1897, after studying with the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and painter William Merritt Chase, Maurer left for Paris, where he stayed the next four years, joining a circle of American and French artists. Finding the instruction at the Academie Julian too limited, he spent most of his time copying in the Louvre. His selfportrait from that time expresses the youthful optimism of that period of his life. At the time, Maurer worked in a conventional but selfassured realist style.

Source: Wikipedia