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George Ames Aldrich

American, 1872-1941

BiographyA descendant of early New England colonists, George Ames Aldrich was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and received a college-preparatory education. He briefly attend New York City’s Art Students League, studying under such prominent artists as Kenyon Cox, William Merritt Chase, and John Twachtman. In 1894, Aldrich made his first trip abroad. In later accounts, he named as his teachers in Paris numerous renowned artists, notably James McNeill Whistler. He made illustrations for several English and American magazines and newspapers and married a Frenchwoman. In northern France he began painting the rural village and river scenes that would become his artistic mainstay.

Aldrich made several long stays in France before 1910. He moved to Chicago in 1917 and the following year made his debut with four paintings in the Art Institute’s annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. Aldrich traveled and painted widely in the 1920s, going both west to the Great Plains and east to various New England coastal locales. He was promenent in smaller cities in Illinois and Indiana. Aldrich frequently exhibited his work in clubs, libraries, hotels, and similar venues in such regional centers as Rockford, Aurora, and South Bend, where he won the faithful support of local collectors. In 1922, the then-divorced artist married a native of South Bend, where he resided until returning to Chicago in 1926. In Indiana, he added the Juday and St. Joseph rivers near South Bend to his narrowing repertoire of landscape subjects. He also painted several views of Chicago and industrial scenes, one of which garnered a prize in the annual Hoosier Salon exhibition in Chicago in 1929.

Both in Indiana and in Chicago, Aldrich’s reputation was at its height in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He won a host of awards at the Hoosier Salon, the Art Institute, and the Chicago Galleries Association, where he was featured in a solo show in 1927; the following year, the City of Chicago purchased one of his Gloucester, Massachusetts, harbor scenes for its municipal art collection. Even before the privations of the Great Depression, however, Aldrich lived a precarious existence due to alcoholism and mental illness. Painting to the last, he died at age sixty-eight, leaving a legacy of some one thousand works.

George

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