Albert Sterner

1863 - 1946

Albert Sterner was born in London in 1863 to an American father and an English mother. After living in Brussels during the early 1870s, his family moved to Birmingham, England in 1874. While attending King Edward's School, Sterner demonstrated an aptitude for art. Upon winning first prize in a drawing contest, he was awarded a scholarship to study drawing at the Birmingham Art Institute.

After a brief period in Germany, working as a clerk in Gaggenau, Sterner spent six months in Freiburg before he eventually moved to the United States in 1879 to join his family who had previously moved to Chicago. He soon began doing lithography, painting, and illustrations. He opened a studio in New York in 1885 and began doing illustrations for magazines including Harper's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, The Century Magazine, and Collier's.

In 1888 he became a student at Académie Julian in Paris. In 1918 he returned to America and began teaching at the Art Students League in New York. Institutions that have exhibited his work include the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Carnegie Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sterner's awards include the Carnegie Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1941.