The House of the Rabbi

George Oberteuffer was born in Philadelphia in 1878. He attended Princeton University and graduated in the class of 1900. After graduation, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz and William Merritt Chase and received his Master of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Oberteuffer’s studies taught him a respect for the traditional values of drawing and painting. He brought those skills in composition, perspective, and color, adding his own genius as a plein air impressionist to France in 1905 where he married a French artist Henriette Amiard and quickly became an active member of the American art community in Paris. A sociétaire of the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, he painted and exhibited scenes of Paris and coastal landscapes of Normandy and Brittany. When the First World War threatened Paris in 1914, he volunteered for the ambulance corps and became a Red Cross volunteer, eventually leading to a commission in the U.S. Army as a captain and senior administrator for relief supplies.

Returning to the U.S. with his wife and two children in 1919, he exhibited his work, often with Henriette, in New York and Chicago and became a popular teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago. The family travelled to art colonies in Wisconsin, Provincetown and Gloucester, MA, and the Maine coast to paint and teach summer classes. Living in New York in the 1930s, he was a member of The National Arts Club and many other arts organizations. It was in New York, he produced many cityscapes like the “House of the Rabbi.”