Albert Henry Krehbiel, one of seven children, was born in Denmark, Iowa, in 1873 and moved with his family to Newton, Kansas, in 1879, where his father was a prominent Mennonite layman, prosperous carriage and buggy maker, and later a co-founder of Bethel College. Krehbiel graduated from Bethel College in Newton and studied for a year at the School of Design and Painting in Topeka, Kansas.

In 1898, Art Institute of Chicago Director William Merchant Richardson French discovered Krehbiel's talents while on a lecture tour in Newton and encouraged him to further pursue a career in art by enrolling at The Art Institute. Heeding Mr. French's advice, he labored for the next four years at The Art Institute as a student and in the fifth year, as a drawing instructor.  In 1902, Krehbiel was granted an American Traveling Scholarship by The Art Institute to study abroad.

Arriving in Holland on July 23rd, 1903, Krehbiel landed in Paris at the end of September to study at the Academie Julian under muralist and history painter, Jean-Paul Laurens. In 1905, two of Krehbiel's neoclassical works were accepted for exhibition at the Exposition Annuelle des Beaux-Arts Salon at the Salon Des Artistes Francais (also known as the Paris Salon) 123rd exposition. 

Between winter sessions at the Academie Julian, Krehbiel spent his summers traveling throughout France and Holland (often with his friend and fellow artist, Joseph Raphael), sketching the local citizens in their daily routine of work and at rest. Krehbiel would reproduce many of the sketches as oils on canvas when back in Paris.

During his last year abroad, Krehbiel made a walking and painting tour of Spain and, upon receiving special permission from Museo Del Prado in Madrid, he created several studies first hand of works done by Diego Velazquez. (Nine of the studies were later shown at The Art Institute of Chicago's Exhibition of Artists' Copies of Old Masters in 1910). Throughout his three-year stay in Europe, Krehbiel won four gold medals at the Academie Julian (the only American ever to have done so) as well as the coveted Prix de Rome and other prizes and honors, including the awarded permanent placement of one of his works on the school's walls. Returning to the United States in 1906, Krehbiel rejoined the faculty of The Art Institute of Chicago at the urging of Mr. French.  That same year, he married his Art Institute classmate, Dulah Marie Evans, also a highly talented artist.

While maintaining a full-time teaching schedule at The Art Institute in 1906, Krehbiel received the commission to design and paint the murals for the walls of the Juvenile Court Room in Chicago. In 1907, having completed the Juvenile Court murals, Krehbiel also entered works in the competition to design and paint the eleven wall and two ceiling murals for the Supreme and Appellate Court Rooms at the Illinois Supreme Court Building in Springfield, the state's capitol. A total of twenty-two designs were submitted from some of the best artists throughout the United States. The Jury of Awards was unanimous in granting the commission to Albert H. Krehbiel with his mural designs depicting the Origin, Function, and Continuity of Law using allegorical and mythological figures. 

Reducing his teaching schedule to summer sessions only, Krehbiel and his wife spent several years on the research, preparation, and composition of the Illinois Supreme Court murals. They purchased a vacant lot next to their home in Park Ridge (a suburb north of Chicago), had a barn moved onto the property, and converted it into a studio. Large canvases were ordered from Paris and pulleys and scaffolds were constructed for the hanging and rolling of the canvases.  Dulah created Grecian gowns and robes, posing in them so that the draping would appear authentic.  When completed in 1911, the canvases were transported to Springfield and installed.  Mr. W. Carby Zimmerman, architect of the Supreme Court Building, considered the work done by Krehbiel to be "an example of the best mural painting ever executed in the West."

Krehbiel returned to full time instruction at the Art Institute in 1911, teaching young students about the use of color, design, and space. In 1913, he also joined the faculty of the Armour Institute of Technology (later named the Illinois Institute of Technology) as an instructor of architectural drawing.  It is here that Krehbiel later, in 1939, developed a close friendship with Armour Institute Director, fellow Cliff Dwellers member, and famous architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had arrived in Chicago from Germany the previous year. Speaking in German, at which Albert was fluent, they would frequently discuss their work over martinis at the Cliff Dwellers, with Ludwig puffing away at a cigar and Krehbiel smoking his pipe.

In 1918 and 1919, Krehbiel summered at an art colony in Santa Monica, California, with Dulah, Evans (their son and only child), and Dulah's sister, Mayetta, where he painted impressionistic high-keyed shoreline views while Dulah painted her son and sister in various settings. In the early 1920s, Krehbiel - again traveling with Dulah, Evans, and Mayetta - spent summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as an exhibiting member of the Santa Fe Art Colony.  There, he produced many brightly hued pastels, watercolors, and oil paintings of the surrounding landscape and local culture in sun-drenched color and loose-forms. Krehbiel was well known and highly regarded as an artist in Santa Fe as well as in Chicago during these years -- so much so that the Museum of New Mexico provided him with a studio in the historic Palace of the Governors next door to his contemporary, famed Ashcan realist Robert Henri.

Krehbiel had associations and exhibitions with many other artists of the Santa Fe Art Colony and the Taos Society of Artists such as Victor Higgins, Earnest Blumenschein, John Sloan, Gustave Baumann, Raymond Johnson, and Stuart Davis. In 1926, Krehbiel helped pioneer the Chicago Art Institute Summer School of Painting (later named Ox-Bow School) in Saugatuck, Michigan, where he spent most of the balance of his summers teaching and painting.  In 1934, he opened his own summer school of art there called the AK Studio. 

When able to free himself from his students in Saugatuck, Krehbiel painted many scenes overlooking the Kalamazoo River and the neighboring rolling hills using different mediums. He also had several occasions in the winters to visit and portray the area in its vast and billowing cover of snow.  Throughout the years when at home in Illinois, Krehbiel painted continuously. From his historic Chicago street and river scenes and his rural and wooded presentations of Midwest forests and the hills and valleys of Galena to his synchromistic figure compositions, he painted incessantly and in all seasons without regard for the elements.

Albert Henry Krehbiel passed away suddenly on June 29, 1945, from a heart attack while preparing for a road trip with his son, Evans, to visit relatives in Kansas. His death occurred on the very day of his retirement from teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, although he had agreed to stay on at The Art Institute of Chicago for one more year.

During his prolific career, Krehbiel had his works shown in a multitude of exhibitions, including the American Art Association (Paris, 1905), Salon Des Artistes Francais (Paris, 1905), Museo Nacional de Pintura Y. Escultura (Madrid, 1906), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1923, 1928, and 1931), the Fiesta Exhibition of Paintings by Artists of New Mexico at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe (1923), the First Exhibition of the National Society of Mural Painters at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy Albright Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York, 1925), and a total of thirty-two exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago from 1906 through 1939.

In addition to those previously mentioned, Krehbiel had exhibitions with many other notable artists of his day such as George Bellows (McPherson, Kansas, in 1918) and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Marsden Hartley, and Sheldon Parsons (El Paso, Texas, in 1920).

Krehbiel was a member of the Cliff Dwellers, Chicago Painters and Sculptors, Mural Painters of New York, and the Chicago Galleries Association. In addition to his earlier awards for painting, he won the Clyde Carr Prize, the Martin B. Cahn Prize for Best Painting, the American Artists Exhibit of Landscapes Award, the Mrs. William H. Thompson Prize, and the Municipal Art League Prize for Landscapes.

Many of Krehbiel's works are held in private collections throughout the world as well as in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the John Vanderpoel Art Association in Chicago, Illinois, Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, Dubuque Museum of Art in Dubuque, Iowa, and The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company in Fort Worth, Texas. Krehbiel has work listed in the Smithsonian Institution

Inventories of American Paintings and Sculpture and selected archival material on Krehbiel's career are available at the Yale University Archives (19 items), Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art in Washington, D. C., as well as at The Art Institute of Chicago's Ryerson and Burnham Libraries and at fine art libraries throughout the country.

Source: askART