Charles Waltensperger (1870-1931) American, Oil on Canvas. Portrays a young woman with a basket of flowers. Signed lower right. 

Condition: Good. 

Overall: 17 1/2 X 15 3/4 in. 

Sight: 13 1/2 X 11 3/4 in. 

#3901 . 

Charles E. Waltensperger was born on April 10th, 1871 in Detroit, Michigan. His father, Fred Waltensperger, was a successful merchant, which afforded his son the freedom to explore art at an early age, mostly drawing their home and surrounding property. He studied formally at the Julius Melchers School with fellow students Joseph Kraemer, Myron Barlow, and Fred Leipziger. While working as an elevator operator for the Detroit Free Press, Waltensperger made sketches of the passengers. This attracted the attention of publisher William E. Quinby, who was so impressed with his drawings that he paid for Waltensperger’s tuition at the school of the Detroit Museum of Art. During the early 1890s Waltensperger exhibited his work in a competition at the Detroit Institute of Arts and was awarded a James E. Scripps scholarship that financed his art studies for two years in Europe. In 1893 he studied at both the Académie des Beaux Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Académie Julian in Paris. He met Benjamin Constant and Jean Paul Laurens, who inspired and befriended him, but his work in this period includes some melancholy aspects that indicate the homesickness he was feeling. When he returned to the United States Waltensperger was employed as a commercial artist, while also working as an illustrator for the Detroit Free Press. He also illustrated books written by M. Quad, the pseudonym of humorist Charles Bertrand Lewis. Waltensperger later established his own studio and turned his interest to creating oil paintings, primarily of Dutch interiors. Missing the inspiration he had found abroad, he traveled extensively in Europe and in New England in his later life, often feeling as if he belonged “everywhere and nowhere.” He had a home for a while in Laaren, Holland, when he became enamored of the scenery and the poor artists living in the area. Each area he spent time in clearly influenced his art, even shifting color and tone depending on where he was in the moment, a remarkably clear indication of the effect of the environment on his style and his wandering, elusive nature. He was a member of a group of Detroit artists known as the Hopkin Club that held exhibitions at the Old Detroit Museum of Art before they established the Scarab Club. Waltensperger never married and during the last five years of his life, ill health forced him to curtail his travels. He died of a heart attack on December 12th, 1931 in Detroit. Today most of his works can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institution of Art, as well as in the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum in Iceland.

Good.