CHARLES DAHLGREEN

Chicago native Charles W. Dahlgreen was born on September 8, 1864.  After working in commercial art as a painter of banners and emblems and trying his hand at prospecting in the Klondike, Dahlgreen decided at age forty to study art seriously and to become a painter.  Dahlgreen enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago where he worked under John H. Vanderpoel, Frederick Freer, and Wellington J. Reynolds.  Already in 1906 he was exhibiting his paintings at the Art Institute (he continued to show over one hundred works there until 1943).  Around 1908 he moved on to study with Charles F. Browne and the portrait painter John C. Johansen.  A year later he sought more training in Düsseldorf, choosing Germany rather than France, as did many midwestern art students.  Dahlgreen was a student at a time when American impressionism was at its peak and he must have absorbed that movement’s theories at home and on the Continent.

Dahlgreen worked en plein air, as did most of his generation of landscapists.  He visited Brown County, Indiana as early as 1914; during the 1930s he was photographed in front of his curious truck-studio.  Dahlgreen also went to the Southwest but his activity there remains uninvestigated.  An interesting still-life entitled Breakfast Table (ca. 1934) shows Dahlgreen’s experimental side and proves that he was no opponent of modernism (illustrated in Logan, 1937, p. 111).  There is a tension between naturalistic spatial construction and cubist-inspired abstraction.  Dahlgreen’s success as a landscape painter and etcher can be measured by the number of awards he earned beginning in 1915 with an Honorable Mention at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.  There, thirty-one of his prints were on display.  His work can be seen in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Decatur (Illinois) Art Center, the Vanderpoel Art Association Collection in Chicago, and the Museum of Science and Art in Los Angeles. 

By the time Dahlgreen died in 1955, he had spent fifty years in his second career as a painter, working in Chicago and its Oak Park suburb.  So fond was Dahlgreen of Brown County that he instructed his ashes to be spread at the foot of his favorite giant oak tree there (Letsinger-Miller, 1994, p. 183).  He had taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and became a member of various local art societies: the Art Service League of Chicago, Art Students League of Chicago, Chicago Painters and Sculptors, the Chicago Society of Etchers, and the Chicago Gallery of Art. Dahlgreen passed away in 1955.

Sources:
“At 40 Charles Dahlgreen Took Up Art,” Art Digest 2 (1 April 1928): 6; Thompson, A. History of Art in Illinois. Exh. cat. Chicago: Union League, 1962; Sparks, Esther, “Biographical Dictionary of Painters and Sculptors in Illinois 1808-1945.” Diss., Northwestern University,  1971, vol. 2, p. 348; Love, Richard H., Louis Ritman: From Chicago to Giverny. Chicago: Haase-Mumm, 1989, pp. 123, 218; Letsinger-Miller, Lyn, The Artists of Brown County. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 179-180, 183; Love, Richard H. and William H. Marshall, The Marshall Collection. Chicago: Haase-Mumm, 1999, pp. 28-29; Love, Richard H. and Michael Preston Worley, Reflections of Reality: American Paintings from the Collection of John and Susan Hainsworth. Chicago: Haase-Mumm, 2005.

Submitted by Richard H. Love and Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.