Alfred Juergens

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Children playing
Girl at the lake (Black Forest)
Besigheim

Alfred Juergens (born August 5, 1866 in Chicago , † April 18, 1934 in Oak Park (Illinois) ) was an American painter.

life and work

Alfred Juergens had German roots: his father Ludwig Daniel Juergens immigrated to Milwaukee in the early 1840s . Ludwig Daniel Juergens already earned his living painting, but at times only as a sign painter. Together with his eldest son Theodore, he founded a business called L. Juergens & Son, Paints in 1875 . The daughter Bertha married Adolph Kruger in 1876, who would later also join the family business.

Little is known about Alfres Juergens' childhood, who would later say that he was born in a pot of paint, so to speak; There are two still lifes with flowers that he probably painted when he was ten. His father, however, wanted to spare him the fate of a jobless artist and initially insisted on a commercial occupation, but the son enforced his wish to become a painter.

Alfred Juergens began his artistic training at the Academy of Design in Chicago before he - after the death of his father in 1883 - traveled to Europe to study further. From Scotland he traveled south to London . He then came to Germany via Holland, where he initially received private tuition from Robert Kochler and Paul Nanen and then from 1884 to 1889 at the Munich Art Academy with Nikolaus Gysis and Wilhelm von Diez . From 1889 to 1893 he stayed in Paris . Finally he returned to Chicago and got a studio in the house of the Academy of Design. In 1894, however, he moved back to Munich, from where he also traveled to Italy. Illness and death of his mother Wilhelmina, b. Prosch, finally moved him to return to America. There he also gave lessons; Clarence Wesley Wigington was among his students .

In the years 1895, 1898 and 1900 he exhibited in the Munich Glass Palace . He was then represented at exhibitions in the USA, including the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco . In 1899, 36 oil paintings by the artist were shown at the Art Institute in Chicago.

Juergens created landscape paintings, portraits and figurative representations that were influenced by impressionism . His pictures of John the Baptist and Let the Children Come to Me are in the Church of St. Paul in Chicago . The Art Institute in Chicago owns Afternoon May of 1913. The painter's works are also in the Cliff Dwellers and Union League Club and the Clark Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan . Ellsworth E. Howard predicted a great future for him in 1901. Over 100 years later, numerous works by the artist from the Tikalsky collection, which Francis Tikalsky had once created, were shown again to the public .

Alfred Juergens was married to Louise Gray. The couple had no children.

literature

Web links

Commons : Alfred Juergens  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thieme-Becker names August 5th as the birthday, but October 5th is given as the birthday on ancestry.com .
  2. ↑ Alfred Juergens on www.illinoisart.org
  3. ↑ Dreck Spurlock Wilson: African American Architects. A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945 . Routledge, 2004, ISBN 978-1-135-95629-5 , page 612 .
  4. ^ Ellsworth E. Howard, Alfred Juergens, Painter , in: Brush and Pencil 7, March 1901, pp. 355-364 ( digitized version ).
  5. ↑ Erica Magda, Alfred Juergens, rediscovered , September 18, 2007 at www.oakpark.com .
  6. ^ Family data on www.ancestry.com .
personal data
SURNAME Juergens, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1934
Place of death Oak Park (Illinois)