Albert Sterner was first an etcher and lithographer and later a painter. His illustrations appeared in St Nicholas Magazine, Life, Harper's, Century, and Colliers. He was a very outspoken lecturer and writer on art and took a highly critical position on "modern" art.
Sterner attended King Edward's School in Birmingham, England. He came to Chicago in 1880 and worked for a lithographic firm. He was one of the founders of the Art Institute (ABG:to be confirmed). In 1885 he made a six month trip to Paris and then in 1890 returned to study formally. He worked under Boulanger and Lefevre (ABG: spelling everyone else used is Lefebvre) at the Acad‚mie Julien and under G‚r"me at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His painting The Bachelor won him honorable mention at the Salon of 1891.
Returning to New York in 1894, he was commissioned to do wash drawings for a ten volume edition of Edgar Allen Poe's works. That year he had his first one man exhibition at Keppel's in New York which featured, among other things, drawings he had made to illustrate Prue and I by George William Curtis. In 1901 he travelled to London where he did drawings for the novels of Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
He settled in Nutley, New Jersey, in 1898, and in 1907 moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where he helped establish the Newport Art Association. His first wife Marie Walther ran the Marie Sterner Art Gallery. Following their divorce, he married Flora Temple Lash in 1924, after which the couple summered in Richmond, Massachusetts, near Pittsfield.
He established one of the first cooperative art societies, "The Painter-Gravers of America", in 1915 and in 1919 was a charter member of The New Society of Artists. He taught at the Art Students League and at the National Academy. George Bellows and Rockwell Kent, among others, were students of his in lithography.
