Albert Lorey Groll

Albert Lorey Groll (1866-1952) was an accomplished American landscape painter celebrated for his atmospheric renderings of the American Southwest, a body of work that secured him a substantial place within early twentieth century American painting. Born in New York City, Groll pursued his artistic training in Europe, studying first at the Antwerp Academy and later at the Royal Academy in Munich under Nicholas Gysis and Ludwig von Löfftz, where he received the rigorous grounding in tonal painting that would inform his mature vision.

After returning to the United States, Groll established himself in New York, but a formative trip to the Southwest in 1904 in the company of the ethnologist Stewart Culin transformed the direction of his career. Traveling through Arizona and New Mexico, Groll became captivated by the vast desert landscapes, the immense skies, and the shifting atmospheric effects of the region. From that point forward, the Southwest would remain his signature subject, and he returned to the area repeatedly over the following decades to gather material for the paintings he produced in his New York studio.

Groll became widely known for his sweeping desert compositions, in which low horizons anchor luminous, cloud-filled skies that occupy the majority of the canvas. These paintings, sometimes referred to in his own time as "sky pictures," earned him the affectionate nickname "Groll of the skies" among his contemporaries. His refined tonal sensibility and his ability to capture the particular quality of southwestern light distinguished his contributions to the American landscape tradition at a moment when many painters were turning their attention to the western regions of the country.

Groll received numerous honors over the course of his career, including the Carnegie Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1904, medals from the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, and election as a full Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1910. He was also a member of the American Watercolor Society and the Salmagundi Club. His paintings are held today in significant American museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery, where they remain valued examples of American landscape painting at the turn of the twentieth century.