Louis Eilshemius

Eilshemius was born into a wealthy family in New Jersey and was educated in Europe before enrolling at Cornell University. After two years he left college to attend the Art Students League in New York and to study with landscape painter Robert Crannell Minor. Eilshemius attended the Académie Julian in Paris and traveled widely as a young man. His early landscape paintings show the influence of the Barbizon School and of American painters George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Around 1910 he began to incorporate more fantasy elements into his paintings and his style shifted. His late works include visionary landscapes peopled by smiling nudes.