George Elbert Burr (1859-1939)

Sale Price US$900.00

George Elbert Burr was born in Monroe Falls, Ohio. When he was ten years old his family moved to Cameron, Missouri. Using a rail pass purchased by his father's hardware store for buying trips; he began traveling around the region sketching the landscapes. He began to make etchings on scraps of zinc while still working with his father. He enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago in December of 1878 for three months.

He return to Cameron, where he worked at the store and married Elizabeth Rogers. While still working at the store he becoming employed as an instructor of drawing and, eventually, an illustrator for such publications as Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Observer, Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and The Cosmopolitan. In 1892, Burr undertook a four-year project to illustrate a catalog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heber R. Bishop Collection of jade. The work was arduous, amounting to a thousand of etchings for the collection, but earned him enough money to travel to Europe, with his wife, for more than four years

Returning to the United States, Burr settled in New Jersey, where he earned a living selling paintings and prints in galleries from New York to Kansas City. His health began to rapidly deteriorate and they moved to Denver, Colorado in 1906. George completed "Mountain Moods", one of the two famous etching series he would complete during his lifetime. He became a member of the Brooklyn Society of Etchers and the New York Society of Etchers and traveled throughout Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.

As Burr aged his health worsened and, in 1924, he moved with his wife to Phoenix. In Phoenix, Burr served as president of the Phoenix Fine Arts Association. He would remain in Phoenix until his death in 1939. (Source: J. Mark Sublette, Medicine Man Gallery, Inc)