Biography
Mathilde Schley
Born 1864 in Horicon, WI.
Died 1941, in Milwaukee, WI.
The eldest of thirteen children, Mathilde Schley grew up in Horicon, Wisconsin, in what was then largely a German-American bilingual community. She displayed an early talent in drawing and developed an interest in preserving an awareness of her German ethnic heritage for younger generations. The author of numerous articles for German and English language newspapers, she later privately published them in book form, using her own paintings as illustrations.
She lived for brief periods in Kansas, Oak Grove and Watertown, Wisconsin and moved to Milwaukee in 1894. While running a dressmaking business there with her sister, she also studied art with several qualified instructors. She was exposed to the German academic style with instruction from Otto von Ernst, Richard Lorenz, and Alexander Mueller. There is some evidence that she worked in some capacity with Lohr & Heine during the painting of the Jerusalem panoramas. Influenced by her travels abroad to Paris and Germany in the late nineteenth century, she abandoned the dark tones of the early style for a brightly colored impressionistic technique with the palette knife. She was an active member of Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors, Salons of America, Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists and the New York Independent Art Society. She held drawing classes in her home in the Schley Apartments on Fifteenth Street in Milwaukee and died there from complications of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six.
Selected Group Exhibitions
1925 Milwaukee Journal Gallery of Wisconsin Art, 4th Quarterly Exhibition
1926 Chicago No Jury Society of America
1926 Buffalo Society of Independent Artists
1926-30 Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors
1926-30 Salons of America
1926-30 Chicago Artists
1938 Society of Independent Artists
1982 Milwaukee Art Museum, Reflections on Milwaukee Journal Gallery of
Wisconsin Art
© 10/23/2007 Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, Wisconsin 6/2/2010