(1866–1952)
Karl Buehr was born in Feuerbach, Germany, and came to America with his family at the age of three. He was a pupil at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1888 until 1894 and exhibited there regularly from 1894 to 1924. Following a period of service in the Spanish-American War, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian with Raphael Collin. At the turn of the century he also visited Holland, where he painted landscapes and peasant scenes in a style that reflects the influence of the French Barbizon School and the Dutch Hague School. Around 1902, Buehr returned to Chicago and taught for several years at the Art Institute.
Buehr lived abroad from 1906 to 1914. He worked in Taormina, Italy, in 1906 and 1907. Next followed a period of study with Frank Brangwyn in London. From 1909-1912 he spent the winter months in Paris and the summers in the village of Giverny, which was a popular artists’ colony and the home of Claude Monet. During 1908-16, a circle of American artists residing in the village developed a decorative style of Impressionist painting centered on the female figure. In addition to Buehr, the circle included Frederick Frieseke, Richard E. Miller, Lawton Parker, Edmund Greacen, Guy Rose, Karl Anderson, Louis Ritman, and George Biddle. Frieseke was the dominant artistic force among the group and inspired his colleagues to adopt an aesthetic that celebrated light, color, and the female form in a personal, expressive, spontaneous, and sensual manner. Frieseke also established the themes that the Giverny Group would explore: fashionably dressed women taking an afternoon rowboat excursion on the River Epte, women posed nude in a garden or landscape setting, women taking tea, talking, dozing, or sewing in a garden, women silhouetted before open windows or doors with a view out into a garden, and women in boudoirs or parlor settings.
When Buehr arrived in Giverny, he was forty-three years old and had been studying art intermittently for more than two decades. Relatively little is known about his work or stylistic development before he arrived there, but it appears that he was equally interested in landscape and figure painting, and that his study with Brangwyn inspired him to develop a decorative aesthetic. Buehr was drawn to Giverny by his close friendship with the academic figure painter Henry Salem Hubbell, who spent time in the art colony in the autumn of 1908 and summer of 1909. Buehr and Hubbell shared the longtime patronage of Chicagoan Lydia Coonley Ward, who financed Buehr’s stay in Europe from 1906 to 1913, providing him a monthly stipend. Ward was friendly with Mary Colman Wheeler, and this association directly led to Hubbell’s visit to Giverny in 1908 and his hiring as an instructor at Miss Wheeler’s School the following summer. Buehr’s Giverny colleague Guy Rose took a strong interest in his work, and Rose and his wife frequently invited the Buehr family to their home.
During Buehr’s first months in the village, he concentrated on completing a large decorative panel of dancing figures, which received an honorable mention at the 1910 Paris Salon. In the summer of 1910, he began to paint garden scenes influenced by his Giverny associate Richard E. Miller. But according to Buehr’s daughter Kathleen, Buehr’s idol was Claude Monet. She and her sister Lydia and brother George often played with the American expatriate artist Theodore Butler’s children at Monet’s house, and Monet was gracious to them all. Buehr appears to have had no personal contact with the French master.
In late 1913, Buehr returned to Chicago and began a long career as one of the Art Institute’s leading instructors. In addition to figure paintings and landscapes, he was active as a portraitist and printmaker. After the artist’s death in 1952, a writer for the Chicago Tribune remarked, “the mention of [Buehr’s] name spells sunshine on a summer day, clear, lovely women who smile from a fresh canvas, and a quantity of flowers. Storm and shadow were foreign to him” (Eleanor Jewett, “U. of C. Offers Series of 12 Art Lectures,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1952, p. 79).
William H. Gerdts has noted that, in Buehr’s works “space is ambiguously defined” and that they are “more independent of spatial illusion than in [those by his] Giverny colleagues” (Monet’s Giverny: An Impressionist Colony [New York: Abbeville Press, 1993], p. 195). Buehr himself remarked that, in painting the figure outdoors, “the artist must paint for the ensemble, with an eye to charming grouping, good arrangement, and color, rather than to portraiture. To spell out each part laboriously . . . would be to lose the picture altogether” (Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Exhibitions at the Chicago Galleries,” Fine Arts Journal 36 [May 1917]: 377).
