(German active Philadelphia 1849-61, 1823-1916)
View on the Ohio River
Oil on canvas, 34 x 48 inches
Signed and dated at lower left: “Paul Weber/1855”
Label (in ink): “View on the/Ohio River/Near [York] P.Weber”; “From/J.D.Williamson/#25 N.6th St.Eastside, Phila/Manufacturer of/Plain, ornamental and gilt/[illegible]”
Landscape and portrait painter Paul Weber studied in Frankfort, Germany and then immigrated to the United States, in 1848. He settled in Philadelphia where he was a frequent exhibitor at the Pennsylvania Academy. Traveling around Scotland and Germany in 1857, he then returned to the United States and taught art in Philadelphia: his students include William Trost Richards, William Stanley Haseltine and Edward Moran. Weber died in Philadelphia in 1916.
This scene depicts the Ohio River which streams westward from Pittsburgh, PA.
About the Artist
(German active Philadelphia 1849-61, 1823-1916)
Gottlieb Daniel Paul Weber, the son of a court musician at the residence of the Grand Duke of Hesse Darmstadt, was born in Darmstadt, Germany. He studied there with the landscapist and genre painter August Lucas and continued his studies in Frankfurt am Main with Jacob Becker at the Staedelsche Institut, and in Munich at the Academy. His training was completed in Antwerp under the genre painter Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans. Weber emigrated to the United States in 1849 after the collapse of the newly formed German republic. He soon established himself in Philadelphia where he became noted as a landscapist and as a private instructor of landscape painting. William Trost Richards and William Stanley Haseltine were two of his more celebrated students. Weber exhibited frequently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, at the Boston Athenaeum, and at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He exhibited eleven works at the Great Central Fair held in Logan Square, Philadelphia, in June, 1864, for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission. Even after his return to Germany in 1861 he continued to exhibit in America and his canvas, A View of Munich was shown in the German section of the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. His paintings have been collected in Germany by the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, the State Museum, Darmstadt, the museum of the Grand Duke, Magdeburg, and the municipal museums of Wupperthal and Hanover. In America, his works have entered the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the High Museum, Atlanta, and the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York.
