Background
Louis Michel Eilshemius was born on February 4, 1864, in North Arlington, New Jersey.
He was the sixth of seven surviving children and fourth of five sons of Henry Gustave and Cecilie Elise (Robert) Eilshemius.
His father had crossed the Atlantic from Holland and had become a prosperous importer; he retired at the age of forty to spend a life of cultivated leisure at his country manor and at the family's winter home in New York City.
His mother, a devout member of the French Evangelical Church, was of French-Swiss extraction, a cousin of the Swiss artist Leopold Robert. She herself made excellent academic drawings and nurtured her son's artistic tendencies.
Education
Eilshemius attended private schools in New York City and Geneva, Switzerland (1873), and the Handelschule in Dresden (1875 - 81), where he studied languages and began his elementary art training.
Upon returning to America, he followed his father's wishes that he enter business and worked briefly as a bookkeeper for a wholesale house, then (1882) began the study of agriculture at Cornell University.
He left after two years without completing a degree when his prodigious outpouring of poetry, drawings, and watercolors convinced his father that he was destined for a career in the arts.
From 1884 to 1886, Eilshemius studied at the Art Students' League in New York, but, disliking the formal instruction, came mainly under the influence of Robert C. Minor.
Eilshemius's early work reflected the cool lyricism and hazy masses of Minor's Barbizon-influenced style and adapted in a personal way his teacher's selective approach to subject matter.
Despite two years in Paris, from 1886 to 1888, at the classical Academie Julian under Adolphe Bouguereau, these tendencies in Eilshemius's painting intensified as he became attracted to Corot's work and studied in Belgium with Minor's teacher, Gerard van Luppen.
Career
In 1887, one of Eilshemius's paintings was accepted at the National Academy of Design, and two were exhibited the following year. In 1890 and 1891, he was represented at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
No further showings followed, however, and when the attention and sales for which he had hoped failed to materialize, he simplified his name to "Elshemus, " in a vain attempt to remove an obstacle to his success.
The death of his father in 1892, left Eilshemius with the means to maintain a studio in New York, live modestly, and travel widely. The years 1892-94, were spent sketching, painting, and writing poetry in Europe and North Africa.
In 1901 and 1902, Eilshemius traveled to Samoa and the South Seas, as well as in the Southern United States and Europe; many of his finest paintings were done at this time.
After 1895, privately printed volumes of his writings began to appear: more than a dozen volumes of poetry, two of short stories, a novel, and various essays and musical compositions.
The recognition he sought still eluded him, and the continuing frustration took its toll.
Bombarding newspapers with hundreds of letters and eccentric accounts of his greatness, he became known as the "Mahatma of Manhattan's Montparnasse" and the "Transcendental Eagle of the Arts. "
Eilshemius's seemingly offhand, spontaneous, and simplified style was distrusted by fellow artists, critics, and the public alike until in 1917, Marcel Duchamp called "Supplication" one of the two really important paintings shown at the Society of Independent Artists.
Even this acclaim, and one-man shows at Duchamp's Society Anonyme (1920, 1924) and the Valentine Gallery (1926), failed to attract the public to Eilshemius's accumulating oeuvre.
His last efforts were swiftly executed and qualitatively uneven "unpremeditated paintings"; although misunderstood at the time, they seem in retrospect almost to foreshadow some of the later avant-garde movements in American art.
In 1921, at the age of fifty-seven, deeply discouraged, Eilshemius gave up painting for good.
He was permanently paralyzed by an automobile accident in 1932.
At about this time, his work suddenly came into vogue. Between 1932 and 1941, he received more than twenty-five one-man exhibitions in New York, with enormous gallery sales and publicity.
After over forty years, the art world had come to recognize, and a few enthusiasts to accept without reservation, the essentially romantic quality of his poetic landscapes, his melodramatically fierce canvases, and, particularly, his lyrical and magically disturbing nudes.
But illness, shrinking income, and increasing irascibility confined Eilshemius to his home and prevented him from enjoying this final decade of success.
In December 1941, having contracted pneumonia, Eilshemius was sent to Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where he died after twelve days. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
