Landscape painter and etcher George Ames Aldrich was born in Worcester, Mass, in 1872. As a member of the Chicago Galleries Association, he was established as a Chicago talent and exhibited there regularly. His early art experience was as a magazine illustrator in the 1890s, when he did illustrations for The London Times and Punch magazine.

Aldrich was enrolled at the Art Students League, his art studies continued in Paris, where he was a pupil at the Academies Julien and Colarossi. Aldrich won four prizes from the Hoosier Salon in Chicago, the first in 1923 for a snow scene. Many of his landscapes were painted in Normandy and Brittany, probably in 1909 and 1910, when he lived in Dieppe.

A critic who saw Aldrich's works in a Chicago show wrote that his paintings had "a sense of a romantic approach to each subject, a spirit of adventure in painting it . . . . His American landscapes were painted with imagination and faithful observance of the original".

In 1924, Aldrich received an architectural-club traveling scholarship for a European study trip. During that time he spent six months in residence at the Academy in Rome, and three months at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Art in France. He traveled and sketched in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and England. Aldrich died at his home in Chicago in 1941, at age 68.

Memberships: Chicago Society of Painters and Sculpture Chicago Gallery of Art Hoosier Salon, Chicago Societe des Artistes Francais Public Collections Ball State Teachers College, Muncie, Ind. Decatur Museum, Ill. Houston Museum of Fine Arts Musee de Rouen Union League Club, Aurora, Ill. Elgin State Hosp., Chicago Fellow, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art American Watercolor Society Salmagundi Club Association of Chicago, Painters and Sculpture Chicago Gallery Association

Listed: AAA 1898-1900 (Chicago) AAA 1903-1913 (Edison Park, Ill. AAA 1915-1924 (Hubbard Woods, Ill. AAA 1925-1933 (Warrenville BENEZI MANTE L / FIELDIN HAVLIC MALLET WHO WAS WHO IN AMERICAN ART, 1936-1959

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton