Albert Herter was the son of the German-born decorative artist Christian Herter, a dominant member of the influential-and immensely successful-New York firm of decorators, Herter Brothers. Artistically precocious, he received his earliest training from his father. He then studied at the Art Students League, New York, under J. Carroll Beckwith and moved on to Paris before he was twenty to study at the Académie Julian with the Symbolist Albert Besnard and with Fernand Cormon and Jean-Paul Laurens. He and his bride, Adele McGinnis, traveled widely after their wedding in 1893. Their most significant excursion was to Japan. (Albert had visited there briefly in 1889.) Watercolors they did in that country were shown to considerable critical approval as a special part of the New York Water-Color Club's annual exhibition late in 1893. The Herters made Paris their base from 1894 until 1898, when they returned to America.
Independently wealthy, the couple immediately built a substantial home in East Hampton on Long Island. Albert also maintained a large studio in New York. Although he was an easel painter, concentrating on portraits and flower still lifes, Herter was more dedicated to mural painting, a specialization he began early in his career. He and Adele undertook complete decorative schemes, notably in their Long Island home.
One of Herter's earliest and most celebrated major murals was the seven-panel work Peoples of the Earth Bring Gifts to California, executed [in 18/19??] for the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Among his other distinguished commissioned murals were those for the state supreme court in the state capitol, Madison, Wisconsin (c. 1917); the state capitol, Hartford, Connecticut (1912-13); the Los Angeles Public Library (1928-30); and the Massachusetts State House, Boston (installed 1942).
The Herters had a daughter and two sons. The elder son, Everit, volunteered for military service as soon as America entered World War I and was killed in action in June 1918. One of Alfred Herter's best-known murals-created as a gift to France in memory of Everit-was Leaving for the Front (1926, Gare de l'Est, Paris); it shows French soldiers being seen off by their families at a train station as they head to battle. The Herters' younger son, Christian, had a distinguished career in public service, holding a succession of elective offices in Massachusetts, including governor, before becoming U.S. Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959 after the death of John Foster Dulles.
Herter's interests and talents ranged widely. Early in his career he produced illustrations, designed interiors and gardens, and wrote plays. In 1908, partly to exercise his talents in textile design, he founded Herter Looms, of which he remained president until 1921. With showrooms in New York and San Francisco, the firm manufactured textiles and rugs and established a tapestry-weaving workshop in New York based on the French model.
Around 1900, Herter's mother moved from New York to Santa Barbara, California, and built a grand home, El Mirasol; the artist and his wife undertook the decorations. Following the senior Mrs. Herter's death in 1914, Herter converted the estate into a semiprivate hotel of the same name, adding garden cottages also decorated by the Herters. Adele and Albert began wintering in Santa Barbara from about the time his mother moved there. They took an active part in the city's cultural life, especially in developing a theater group for which Albert designed sets and costumes as well as acted. Following his wife's death in 1946, Albert Herter made Santa Barbara his year-round home.
Although he had exhibited in the Academy annuals of 1893, 1894, 1905, and 1906, Herter was not elected to the Academy. He became an Associate automatically upon the 1906 merger of the Academy and the Society of American Artists, which he had joined in 1894. He continued showing with the Academy almost annually from 1906 through 1918 and then only twice more, in the annual of 1925 and the winter exhibition of 1930. His election to full Academician in 1943, he wrote the Academy, "came somewhat as a surprise since it is hard to understand what after almost fifty years as Associate should have prompted a change in my status in my old age." In the ensuing exchange of letters between Georg Lober, the Academy's secretary, and Herter, Lober recalled that he had met the artist seven years earlier at the opening of an exhibition of his work at the Four Arts Society in Palm Beach, Florida, and had been "deeply impressed by the high qualities of your portraits." It is possible that it was Lober's experience that spurred Herter's late advancement to Academician.
Herter was diligent in making his qualifying presentation to the Academy to secure his election to Academician. Apparently, however, this recognition at so late a date in a thoroughly successful career did not make an overwhelming impression. Herter seems never to have added the fact of his membership status to his résumé. No obituary or subsequent biographical summary records his Academy affiliation as other than Associate.
