Realistic painter, George Hetzel is considered one of Pennsylvania's most significant landscape, portrait, and still-life painters of the nineteenth century.
He was born in Hangviller, a small village in the province of Alsace, France, in 1826. Hetzels father decided that America offered unparalleled opportunities for a better life, however, and when George was two years of age, his family left Hangviller for the New World. Their travels took them from the port of Baltimore to their final destination, a small farm in Allegheny City, now the North Side of Pittsburgh. Hetzel attended public school in Allegheny City and was later apprenticed to a house and sign painter. Approximately four years later he was accepted as an apprentice by a local artisan for whom he decorated cabins and public rooms on riverboats and painted murals in a number of Pittsburgh saloons.
Hetzel's father realized that his son possessed an outstanding artistic talent. He decided George should further his studies at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in Germany, which was one of the foremost art schools in Europe at that time. Hetzel departed Pittsburgh in late 1847, and for the next two years devoted himself to the study of portraiture, landscape and still-life painting. He received instruction in anatomy and the fundamentals of draftsmanship, sketched from plaster casts and, later, live models.
The instructional model employed by European art schools typically included students copying of the works of acknowledged masters, which allowed them to study various techniques and subsequently formulate their own style. Hetzel also became a member of the Masterclass (die Meisterklasse), wherein an advanced student was permitted to work on an independent project under the close supervision of his professor. He received extensive instruction in the use of chiaroscuro, which utilizes light and dark in the massing of form and the achievement of dramatic effect. His early paintings reflect a strong grasp of this technique as well as the type of realism for which the Academy was renowned. Hetzel returned to Pittsburgh in 1849 when growing political unrest in Europe ended his formal training.
Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Hetzel continued to rely on realistic detail to convey texture and reflected light, and in the mid-1850's showed the influence of Asher B. Durand, the American landscape painter and an influential member of the Hudson River School. Hetzel began to incorporate into his work both Durand's technique and his spiritual perspective, which averred that mankind's spiritual nature must be reflected in an artist's representation of the natural world.
In the 1870s Hetzel came under the influence of the Barbizon School, which, in turn, would herald the coming of Impressionism. His style grew toward a tonalist aesthetic by the end of the century and evolved from a tightly painted, detailed technique generally associated with the Hudson River School to a freer brush and more painterly style generally associated with the Barbizon School.
George Hetzel was instrumental in the formation of the Scalp Level School of painting. Scalp Level is an area near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where Paint Creek and Little Paint Creek converge. Hetzel was so taken with the beauty of the woodlands he witnessed there while on a fishing trip in 1866 that he convinced his colleagues, with whom he taught at the Pittsburgh School of Design, to accompany him on a painting jaunt the following summer. Groups of artists and students returned to the area with Hetzel more or less regularly; thus was born the Scalp Level School.
Today the overlook off PA Route 56 frames a distinctive landscape: a drift mine, a coal town, and a pile of coal refuse, -legacies of the industrial 20th Century. A current visitor to the Mine 40 Overlook might be amazed to learn that this valley, once-pristine, inspired an entire genre of American art 150 years ago. Traveling by train and then horse and carriage, the artists would come to Scalp Level and set up outdoor studios in the wooded hills and along the banks of Paint Creek. There they would record for posterity what they saw.
Hetzel, along with brothers William Coventry Wall and Alfred S. Wall, were part of the first generation of landscape artists who strove to faithfully render the images and colors there. In 1905, however, the Berwind-White Coal Company moved into the region and opened Eureka Mine 40 at Scalp Level. The mine would become one of the coal company's biggest producers, and while that was good for the economy, it was bad for the Scalp Level group. The green paradise became blackened by mining, and stands of trees were gradually replaced by rows of company houses.
From his studio in Pittsburgh, Hetzel continued to paint highly detailed, realistic views of nature, moving increasingly in the latter part of his career towards impressionistic concerns with light. A hint of Impressionism can be detected in some of his very late works, but Hetzel never abandoned the realism with which he and his art are linked. He was also very popular as a portraitist, and was noted for his sensitivity. All of his work possesses a quality of benevolent quiet and pensiveness.
Hetzel exhibited at the National Academy in New York from 1965 to 1882 and at the Pennsylvania Academy until 1891. He was the only Pittsburgh artist represented at the 1876 Centennial exposition held in Philadelphia. Hetzel was also a teacher at the Pittsburgh School of Design for Women. Masterworks of George Hetzel: A Centennial Exhibition, was shown at the Johnstown Flood Museum, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. George Hetzel died in Pittsburgh in 1899.
