Albert Edward Sterner

American, 1863 - 1946

BiographyThough an American citizen born of American parents in London in 1863, Albert Edward Sterner studied drawing as a teenager at the Birmingham Art Institute in England. The dates are clouded, but he lived in Germany in Gaggenau and Freiburg from sometime in the late 1870s until he went to Chicago between 1879 and 1882. He worked with Walter Wilcox Burridge there, painting theater scenery, in addition to illustrating newspaper articles, and employment in the lithography business.

Though Sterner moved to New York City in 1885, for the next twenty years he was mainly in Europe. In Paris in 1886, he studied at the Academie Julien with Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. He received numerous commissions for magazine illustrations.

Sterner was quite sensitive to his role as an illustrator, which was his main endeavor, he believed that illustrators should earn the same respect as fine artists. But Sterner did paint and exhibit oil paintings, drawings, watercolors and lithographs which included landscapes, portraits and still lifes and evidenced being an able draftsman in an academic style.

The long-lived Albert Sterner died at age eighty-three in 1946. His memberships include the American Watercolor Society, Art Association of Newport, National Academy of Design, Painter-Gravers of America, and Society of Illustrators. His work is found in the Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Kupferstitch Kabinet, Dresden; Kupferstitch Kabinet Pinakothek, Munich; Toronto Museum of Fine Arts; Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York Public Library, New York City.

Source: David Michael Zellman, "Three Hundred Years of American Art"

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