Artist

Ahrens, Carl Henry

Title

Tree Trunks

Technique

etching

Dimensions

28.8cm height x 23.3cm width

Type

print

Accession Number

1979.58

Owner

City of Burnaby

Collection

Permanent Collection

Carl Henry Ahrens was born in 1862 in Winfield, Ontario, and became a prominent painter, printmaker, and illustrator in North America in the early 20th century. In the early 1880s, Ahrens moved to Nebraska to practice dentistry, but at the age of 24, he began to paint and soon moved his family to Toronto to pursue his new passion. In 1889, Ahrens had his first exhibition with the Ontario Society of Artists, and by 1891, he was elected Associate Painter in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Mostly self-taught, he eventually went to New York to study painting under William Merritt Chase and sculpture under Francis Edwin Elwell. While there, he also befriended artist George Inness, who became his mentor. In the early part of his career, Ahrens used tonalism to give his work a coloured atmosphere or mist, but later he bagan to work in a more post-impressionistic manner. Though he did produce many portaits, Ahrens is best known for his tree studies. He died in February 1936 at the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital after struggling for years with illness and an addiction to codeine.