Albert Lorey Groll

Albert Lorey Groll (1866 - 1952)

Born in New York City, Albert Groll became a much admired, successful Western desert landscape and skyscape painter, although he remained a resident of New York City where he associated with the cultural elite. In 1910, he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Many of his landscape paintings were rich in color with elements of both realism and a sense of abstraction.

He spent most of his student years in Munich, Germany, at the Royal Academy studying with Ludwig Loefftz, and in London, England. He also studied at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, something few Americans were doing in the late 19th century. He painted along the Atlantic Coast and then went West with Brooklyn Indian ethnologist, Professor Stuart Culin, who was writing a treatise on Indian games. Groll painted landscapes in Arizona and New Mexico, especially skyscapes with towering cloud formations. The Laguna Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were so admiring of his landscapes they named him Chief Bald-Head-Eagle Eye. In 1905, he first came to Arizona, where he became a friend and guest of Indian dealer Lorenzo Hubbell at his well-known Ganado trading post. One of Groll's desert scenes, "Arizona," won a gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1906. In 1908, Groll spent the summer in Arizona and at Yellowstone National Park. He also did a lot of painting in New Mexico at Laguna and Santa Fe, and is credited with introducing William Robinson Leigh to the Southwest. The two of them had studied together in Munich, and at Groll's suggestion, first went to New Mexico in 1906. In addition to the method of pure oil painting, Groll mixed crayon with oil and sometimes scuffed the surface to get a textural effect.