was a Wiscoirsin artist who specialized in painting landscapes depicting either woodletnd scenes or rural scenes with farm buildings. Although bom in Germany, most of his life was spent in Wisconsin and almost all of his canvases are of Wisconsin subjects. In what follows we will present an outline of his career.'Stoltenberg was bom near Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, on 8 April 1879. His father, Joachim Stoltenberg, was German, but his mother, Anna Fredricksen Stoltenberg, was Danish. There were seven children in the fanuly, four boys and three girls. Stoltenberg's father made a meager living by working in a factory which produced sheet copper.Stoltenberg grew up in a rural area about twenty miles from Flensburg. The locality was then part of Germany, but was ceded to Denmark after World War I. The local countryside was wooded and beautiful, but the family was poor and lived crowded into two rooms of a rustic cottage. Each day Stoltenberg walked to school wearing wooden shoes.Ŝ ometime during the 1880s Stoltenberg's father died. Wilhelm, the oldest son in the family, immigrated to America in 1885 and found work in Milwaukee as a house painter. In 1891 Stoltenberg's widowed mother left Germany with her remaining children, sailing to America on a converted cattle ship.^ The family joined Stoltenberg's brother in Milwaukee, where Anna eked out a sparse income by doing piece work for a clothing manufacturer.Forced to help support the family, Stoltenberg no longer attended school but w o r k ^ as a water carrier on a construction site. An older brother, Frederick, found work as a painter and decorator with Brown and Harper, a decorating firm in downtown Milwaukee. Around 1895 Hans was hired as an apprentice by the same firm and from his brother Frederick learned the trade of a master grainer, a craft which involves the application of paint in such a way that pine panels can be made to resemble marble or quarter-sawed oak.
In the year 1849 Milwaukee was a fast-growing frontier city. About a third of the city's twenty thousand residents were immigrants from Germany, a proportion that was to remain stable for the rest of the century. The Milwaukee of 1849 was a city of unpaved streets and buildings of mostly single-story wood construction. Cultural life was limited and there were few opportunities for a professional artist to earn a living. Nonetheless, a few portrait artists had settled in the city by this time. Among these were two Scotsmen, Bumard Durward and George Robertson, and the English-bom Samuel Marsden Brookes. All three of these artists eventually left Milwaukee, Brookes and Durward leaving in 1862. Henry Vane Throne, a young English gentleman, had arrived in 1847. He produced landscapes of local scenery and founded a drawing class, the first such enterprise in the state. His promising career came to an abrupt end, however, when he was killed in an accident a few years later. 1In late 1849 Heinrich Vianden arrived from Germany and joined the small group of artists who had already taken up residence in Mil waukee. He was a trained professional and the first German-bom artist to settle permanently in the city. Known in America as Henry Vianden, he soon began to give instruction in painting and drawing, thus filling the void left by the premature death of Henry Vane Thome. Within a few years he was firmly established as the city's leading professional artist. Through his role as an art teacher, he had a profound influence on an entire generation of younger artists in the city. A shrewd judge of talent, he encouraged several of his best students to seek further training in Europe.Vianden was already recognized in his own day as an outstanding local artist, a view which was reaffirmed by Porter Butts, who wrote the authoritative history of art in Wisconsin.^ More recent scholarship has confirmed Vianden's position as an important early regionalist painter in the Midwest. The Milwaukee Art Center owns seven of his land scapes, at least two of which have been loaned out for inclusion in 137
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