George Elbert Burr

Who was George Elbert Burr?

George Elbert Burr was an American printmaker and painter best known for his etchings and drypoints of the desert and mountain regions of the American West.

Burr was born in 1859 in Munroe Falls, Ohio. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for one winter, his only formal artistic training. Nevertheless, he enjoyed early success as a commercial artist, providing illustrations for Harper's, Scribner's Magazine, Frank Leslie's Weekly, and The Cosmopolitan. In 1892, he began a four-year project illustrating a catalog of Heber R. Bishop's collection of jade antiquities for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. This project, which involved producing etchings of over a thousand artifacts, paid well enough for Burr to embark on an extended tour of Europe with his wife upon its completion. Over the next five years, as they traveled in Italy, Germany, and the British Isles, Burr amassed sketches and watercolors that would provide the source material for his copperplate etchings of European scenes.

A few years after his return to the United States, an attack of the flu prompted Burr to move to Denver for the benefit of his health.