Leopold Gould Seyffert (January 6, 1887 – June 13, 1956) was an American painter. Born in California, Missouri, and raised in Colorado and then Pittsburgh, his career brought him eventually to New York City, via Philadelphia and Chicago. In New York City, the dealer Macbeth established him as one of the leading portraitists of the 20th century and his over 500 portraits continue to decorate the galleries, rooms and halls of many of America's museums and institutions.
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Overview
Among the many people that Seyffert painted were figures of America's cultural, business and political elite. His subjects included Henry Clay Frick (Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh), Fritz Kreisler (National Portrait Gallery), Andrew Mellon (Choate School and BNY Mellon Collection), John Wanamaker (US Postal Museum), Edward T. Stotesbury (Stotesbury Collection), Elizabeth Arden, Samuel Gompers (New York Historical Society), John Graver Johnson (Corcoran Art Gallery), railroad financier Edward Brinton Smith (Private Collection), Charles Lindbergh and David Sarnoff.
Seyffert was recipient of a long string of prizes and honors given by the major American art organizations and museums, often for his non-commissioned work. In these paintings he painted with a vigorous brushwork and palette (as his older contemporaries, Robert Henri and George Bellows, sometimes did in their paintings of children).
As a young artist, Seyffert traveled three times to Europe in 1910, 1912, and 1914. Like many young artists he painted from Velasquez in the Prado and was influenced by Hals, Van Gogh and Goya. During these trips he used ordinary people as subjects. Their unique faces and colorful costumes inspired some of his earliest works. Later his portraits, nudes and flower still lifes kept the lessons learned from these years while adding a more refined and simpler style.
Seyffert's life and career spanned the first half of the 20th century. He lived, taught and painted in several historic cities and many of his sitters played a significant role in American history, particularly during the roaring 20s.
Childhood and studies
Seyffert's ancestors' origins were in the Saxony region of Germany, with his grandparents hailing from Zwikau, a village near Leipzig. His grandfather and father, Hermann (at age 4) arrived in New York in 1854. The family traveled to St. Louis and then went west settling with other German immigrants in Missouri.
Seyffert was born in the town of California, Moniteau County, Missouri in 1887, the second youngest of seven, to Hermann and Emma Tweihaus Seyffert. The following year his family moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they built a cabin in the foothills of the Cheyenne Mountains on the Cheyenne Creek, near what is today The Broadmoor resort. In 1890 his father died after falling off a roof, leaving all the family having to work or marry early. Leopold's earliest art exposure came from his briefly studying with an artist named La Salle but he also painted cakes in the local bakery and glass eyes for a taxidermist. His older brother Lou moved to Pittsburgh and after getting a job in the office of Standard Oil geologist John Worthington, he sent for "Lee" and their mother to move east. In 1904, en route they visited the St. Louis World's Fair where he saw his first painting exhibition. Once in Pittsburgh Leopold began working as an office boy for Worthington and his artistic talent came to the attention of his boss. For two years he studied at the Stevenson Art School with Horatio Stevenson while living with the Worthington family and later Worthington loaned him the money to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a debt he paid off with many portraits of their family.
Starting in 1906 until 1913 he studied at the academy with Thomas Pollock Anschutz, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux and Hugh H. Breckenridge. During these lean years he worked at the local boys club and as a semi-professional baseball player, while his commissions began. Thanks to the recommendations of William Merritt Chase he painted Chase's lawyer's daughter, Libby Deyoung, who later married Sylvan Levin. Chase also bought a portrait he did of his wife Helen Fleck. He did many copies of works in the Federal Courthouse in Philadelphia and these paintings, from 1905 to 1915 are little known and still hang in many spots in and around Philadelphia.
Teaching and career
From 1909 to 1913, he taught at Graphic Sketch Club, Philadelphia, which now is the Samuel S. Fleisher Memorial. In 1910, he won the Cresson Traveling Scholarship, and went to Europe with his fiancée, the painter Helen Fleck, and her mother. In 1911 they married and in 1912, he again won the Cresson Scholarship, allowing them to travel and work in Volendam, Holland. During these years, he met Leopold Stokowski, who became a close friend, and the resulting portrait (below) won the 1913 Fellowship Prize and the Popular Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy annual. Also that year, he won honorable mention at the Carnegie International Exhibition for a Volendam painting, Tired Out, and he was honored with a special section at Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. During the summer, he painted Robert Walton Goelet’s wife, Elsie Whelen Goelet at Ochre Court in Newport, Rhode Island.
In 1914, he and Helen and their first child, Mary Louise, summered in Spain where he and friend Waldo Pierce visited Ignacio Zuloaga, and painted colorful people in Segovia, including Daniel Zuloaga. The same year, he was one of three artists in group exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, where he exhibited some of his early masterworks, most of which are in museums today.
He continued his teaching during 1914–1921 at another school, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) in Philadelphia, a school that at the time was managed largely by the Sartain family. In 1915 their second child, Richard (Leopold, Jr.), was born. That year he won the gold medal at the Philadelphia Art Club, and silver medal, Panama Pacific Exposition, San Francisco. In 1916 he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design, also winning the Beck Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy, for a portrait of the violinist Fritz Kreisler, now in the National Portrait Gallery. The same year he had solo exhibitions in Boston at St. Botolph Club and Copley Gallery. He summered in Seal Harbor, Maine, (photographed left) with group of Philadelphia artists and musicians where he began series of charcoal portraits of these personalities. He returned to Seal Harbor the following summer where his second son, Peter, was born. In the fall he moved to Chicago and began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (a post he continued to hold until 1927). In December he was in a group exhibit at the Detroit Museum of Art with Karl Anderson, Hayley Lever and Ernest Lawson.
Last years
He became an avid gardener and began painting flower still lifes. For the following 10 years he spent time between his country home in Easton, Connecticut and New York. In 1946 he was honored with the Gold Medal of Honor at the Allied Artists Exhibition, New York. At this point in his life his health began to deteriorate from his smoking and drinking, though his commissions continued. In 1953 while he was painting two of the National Gallery's (Washington, DC) founders, Rush and Samuel Kress, his wife Bobbi died. Both his boys, Peter and Richard (formerly Leopold, Jr.), were living in Peru. He painted his last portrait of Frank Porter Graham and also during his last years a new model and companion, Ramona, lived with and cared for him until his death from esophageal cancer in Bound Brook, New Jersey, in 1956.