Born in Chicago, Illinois, Albert Herman Schmidt was a founding member of the Santa Fe, New Mexico Art Colony. Although he painted portraits, he was primarily known for his landscapes inspired by his awe of the expanse of Northern New Mexico.

He was a pupil of Charles Francis Browne at the Art Institute of Chicago and then studied at the Julian Academy in Paris, the pupil of Henri Martin. He settled permanently in Santa Fe in 1921 and applied his academic training to Southwestern subjects. Many of his Indian portraits were done in formal, traditional style.

He was very quiet and unassuming and did not actively seek exhibitions for himself, preferring to paint for personal pleasure.

Sources:
Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Biographical Dictionary of Artists of the American West

Albert Schmidt was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1885 and began his art training at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1904. He, like many other American art students, traveled to Europe to further his education. In 1910, he began studies at the Academie Julian in Paris. Schmidt expanded his studies with travels throughout Europe to see works by masters and contemporary Europeans.

In 1921 when Albert and his wife and son were on their way to California, they stopped in Santa Fe, fell in love with the area, and decided to stay. Schmidt was struck by the expanse of the northern New Mexico landscape and devoted his entire life to painting those scenes. He used the European academic traditions he learned at the Art Institute of Chicago throughout his career in addition to the more modern techniques: the color patches of the Impressionists, the serpentine lines of Art Noveau, the blocky masses of the Cubists, and the bright colors of the Expressionists.

His love for the land led to his great interest in light and color effects, design, and tonal analysis. Schmidt was always interested in experimental techniques and had the opportunity to freely experiment since he had no concerns about selling his paintings; his wife earned an income from rental property in Chicago. His main interest was in oils, but by the late 1920s, he developed a love for pastels; the tones were perfect for representing the landscape. He also experimented in watercolor, charcoal and graphite.

Schmidt is not as well known as his contemporaries because he did not actively seek exhibitions for himself, he did not exhibit in commercial galleries or exhibit with other artists. He preferred to paint for personal pleasure. Schmidt was a founding member of the Santa Fe Art Colony, but because he was so quiet and unassuming, he was described as being a silent partner. He found in New Mexico a place where he could feel at peace with himself, a place where human scale was not diminished by buildings, but by mountains and trees. His experiments in composition, color, and medium created a oeuvre of distinct works: still lifes, landscapes, figures, genre scenes and nature studies which run the scale from tender to dynamic.

Albert Schmidt was an early member of the Santa Fe art colony, best known for his high-key modernist landscapes.

Schmidt was born in Chicago, the son of a physician. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago for four years before enrolling at the Julian Academy in Paris. In 1912 he married fellow student and Chicagoan, Marjorie Hanson, and the couple returned to Chicago the following year.

Schmidt exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1911, the National Academy of Design in 1914, and the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915.

In 1921 Schmidt visited the Southwest and was so impressed with Santa Fe that he resolved to move there. The next year, the couple arrived in New Mexico, settling in the village of Tesuque, just north of Santa Fe. They asked Santa Fe artist and builder, William Penhallow Henderson, to design and construct their home.

Schmidt's early paintings are in the manner of the French Impressionists, but he soon developed a modernist style with simplified, sometimes angular drawing, and a bright palette clearly influenced by the Fauves with whom he worked in Paris. He painted mostly in oil or pastel. Schmidt's compositions employed the concepts of Dynamic Symmetry, developed by the artist Jay Hambidge, which use a proportioning system based on specific mathematical ratios including the Golden Section.

The Schmidts apparently were able to live on Marjorie's inheritance, and Albert did not feel compelled to actively market his work. However, he did participate in many exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe from 1924 until his death, including twelve solo exhibitions. The Museum held a memorial exhibition for Schmidt in 1958. After Marjorie's death in 1992, her granddaughter inherited the estate and discovered a cache of hundreds of Schmidt's works in the garage of the Tesuque home.