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Ernest Albert

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Ernest Albert
Lyme Art Colony
American, (August 15, 1857–April 1946) In Lyme: Summers, 1921-1928
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Albert began sketching and studying art as a boy. At fifteen he won the Graham Art Medal at the Brooklyn Institute School of Design. While still very young he did free lance work for New York newspapers, sketching events and happenings of the day.

In 1877, when he was 20, the need to earn a regular living led him to Harley Merry's Theater in New York where he began a long and distinguished career as a theatrical designer and scenic artist in New York, Boston, Montreal, St. Louis,Philadelphia, Chicago, and London. He married Annie Maxwell in 1881 and in 1885 they moved to Chicago.

He became a member of the St. Louis Sketch Club in 1881, and in 1885 he exhibited landscape paintings with the Western Artists Association. He was instrumental in founding the American Society of Scenic Painters and was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists.

In 1892-93 Albert helped design the decorative and color schemes for many buildings for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition and a portrait he painted of his daughter was hung in the exposition.

He moved back to New York in 1894 and rented a house for his family in New Rochelle which, at that time, was a gathering place for a diverse group of people. In 1896 Albert purchased land there and built a house which he named "Grayeyres." Now in his forties he began gradually withdrawing from scenic design and devoted more time to his easel, to paint the snows, old mills, and the autumn landscapes. At this time he also began spending the summers in Old Lyme, Connecticut at the Griswold House where so many other painters stayed. His wife always went with him and, in later years, his son-in-law and son. After 1915 he also spent time on Monhegan Island in Maine.

In 1915 he leased an estate in New Canaan, Connecticut on 16 acres of land with two house so that his daughter and son-in-law could live nearby. In 1925 his wife Annie died and Albert took a studio and apartment at the National Arts Club.

Albert continued to paint several hours a day until the end of his life, and to exhibit at widely dispersed galleries across the country. His last one man show was in New York at Rockefeller Center in 1941. He died in April of 1946 at the home in New Canaan.

Albert became president of the Allied Artists of American in 1914. In 1922 he was elected an Artist Member of the National Arts Club in New York and became and Associate of the National Academy of Design.


excerpted from "Ernest Albert A.N.A. (1857-1946) exhibition catalogue published by Vose Galleries, Boston, Mass, 1981.

One critic has called him "the master of time and environment," and points out that while other great landscape artists like Thomas Cole and Frederick Church seemed to paint in awe of nature, Albert's work pictures man as nature's master.


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