The California Plein Air movement occurred at the end of the 19th century, at the same time the Arts and Crafts Movement in the U.S. was in high gear. Several American artists who had studied formally in Europe embraced the new Impressionist style of painting. When they came home, some of them migrated to Southern California and began painting the California landscape, attempting to capture the wonderful lighting and color they observed there. Some of the most important Plein Air painters include Guy Rose, Benjamin Brown, W.L. Judson, Granville Redmond, Hanson Puthuff, Marion Wachtel, William Wendt, and Franz Bischoff, who lived and worked in the Detroit area for a time where he became nationally famous as a china painter.
Mr. Bischoff was born in Austria in 1864 and came to the U.S. at the age of 21 after studying art in Vienna. He began his career in the U.S. as a china painter in New York. In the late 1800’s, the country was swept up in something of a china painting fad, and Franz Bischoff became the most famous china painter of his day. From New York he moved to Ohio, then finally to Detroit to work in a ceramic studio.
Shortly after coming to Detroit, Bischoff opened his own studio in Dearborn where he produced ceramics and taught china painting. Later, he established the Bischoff School of Ceramic Art in Dearborn and New York. One of his students was Mary Chase Perry, who began her career as a china painter before becoming a potter and establishing the Pewabic Pottery (see Mary Stratton and Pewabic Pottery in the archives).
As a china painter, Bischoff was most famous for his roses, and became known as the “King of the Rose Painters.” He created many colors in his studio, his most famous being Ashes of Roses. He participated in exhibits and won several awards for his work. Click here to see some more examples of his china painting.
In 1906, Bischoff exhibited at the Women’s Century Club of Seattle annual exhibition, and was considered a “nationally known ceramic artist.”1 At some point in 1906, he moved to California and turned his attention from china painting to canvas painting. Although he continued to paint roses, he also turned to landscapes. At that time, Los Angeles was developing an art colony of Impressionists known as Plein Air painters. These artists were heavily influenced by the French Impressionists who embraced the light, color and spontaneity available by painting outdoors, or "en plein air," versus painting in the studio. In southern California, especially, clear and intense light was abundant.
Bischoff settled in the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, an area where the Greene and Greene architectural masterpieces were being built (the Gamble House was built there in 1908). He painted many landscapes of the Arroyo Seco as well as other sites in California and Utah.
Bischoff was famous for his color work with ceramics, and he continued to be known as an innovative colorist on canvas. He died in 1929, about the time that the Plein Air Movement was coming to an end. The Depression took artists in a new, grittier direction. And although his work (as well as that of his contemporaries) was all but forgotten in the following decades, today we have a new appreciation of this movement, with paintings selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Franz Bischoff’s work can be seen at the Irvine Museum in California and formerly at the Fleischer Museum, which unfortunately is now closed.
1 Lawrence Kreisman and Glenn Mason, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, (Portland, OR: Timber Press, Inc., 2007), p. 81.
