back to notes

George Elbert Burr

George Elbert Burr

Older than the other artists, George Elbert Burr (1859-1939) was in the Southwest during the same period. Burr’s elegant drypoint “Oasis of Seven Palms, California,” 1921, captures the regionalism and era. Burr was an American printmaker and painter best known for his etchings and drawings of the desert and mountain regions of the American West. Born in Monroe Falls, Ohio, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for one winter, his only formal artistic training. Still, he had early success as a commercial artist, providing illustrations for Harper’s, Scribner’s, Frank Leslie’s Weekly and The Cosmopolitan. In 1892, he began a four-year project illustrating a catalog of Heber R. Bishop’s collection of jade antiquities for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The project paid well enough that he and his wife could make a five-year extended tour of Europe once it was completed. Burr brought home sketches and watercolors that provided the source material for copper plate etchings of European scenes.