Painting of the nineteenth century in Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and Russia
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Robert Koehler was an American painter and art-school director. As a pioneer of art instruction and appreciation in the Northwest he exerted an influence which can hardly be overestimated.
Background
Robert Koehler was born on November 28, 1850 in Hamburg, Germany. He was the son of Ernst Theodor Koehler and Louise Büter. When Robert was three years old the family emigrated to America, Herr Koehler establishing a machine shop in Milwaukee.
Education
In the German schools the boy excelled in drawing and later learned the trade of lithography. He studied nights at the National Academy of Design. Although his ambition at first ran no higher than to become a fine commercial lithographer, he studied with the best masters Munich afforded, Piloty, Lefftz, and Defregger, and decided to devote himself to painting.
Career
At the outset of his career Koehler was threatened with blindness but an operation averted calamity and he plunged energetically into commercial engraving, working first in Milwaukee and later in Pittsburgh and New York. In New York he earned his living by day in Arthur Brown's lithographic establishment on Thames Street, in the shadow of Old Trinity, finally attracting the attention of George Ehret, a wealthy New York brewer, who bought his pictures and sent him to Munich in 1873 to study.
Forced by lack of funds to return to New York in 1875, he worked as pupil at the Academy and at the Art Students' League, returning to Munich four years later.
Koehler returned to New York in 1892 and the following year was persuaded to succeed Douglas Volk as director of the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts. Against the advice of friends he accepted the post and spent the remainder of his life there, twenty-one years as director and three as director emeritus. Although his talent as an artist was negligible, his devotion to the school in the face of many discouragements was heroic.
He persuaded Eastern artists to send their pictures west for exhibition and arranged that at least one picture should be bought each year to become the property of the parent organization, the Society of Fine Arts. He lectured endlessly and wrote the major portion of the Bulletin of the society, contributing to its pages a delightful series, "Chapters from a Student's Life" (September 1906 - Midsummer 1907), which describes his years in Munich. He founded and for seven years directed the Minnesota State Art Society, which, through the medium of traveling exhibitions of prints, sent echoes of the masters through farm district and isolated town. Although academic by training, he did not close his mind entirely to modernism.
His paintings are owned by the Kunstverein, Munich, the Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, the public libraries of Minneapolis and Duluth, and the museums of Minneapolis and Milwaukee.