Horter, Earl

Born 8 December 1880 in Ardmore, Pennsylvania and raised in Philadelphia. He was a self-trained artist, printmaker and commercial illustrator. Skilled as a draughtsman, his first work was as a landscape artist, at the age of 19 in 1900, before moving to New York in 1903, where he was employed by the Calkins and Holden advertising agency. Once in New York, he studied engraving and became a member of the Society of Illustrators in 1910. In 1911, he was commissioned, along with other artists, by the New York Edison company to illustrate scenes of New York for the book Glimpses of New York: An Illustrated Handbook of the City. In 1914, he joined the New York Society of Etchers and exhibited for the first time with them. In 1915, he exhibited at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and was awarded the Silver Medal and held his first one-man exhibition at the Keppel and Company Gallery in New York City in 1916. In 1917, Horter returned to Philadelphia to work as an illustrator for the advertising firm N.W Ayer, where he was employed as the art director until 1923. He traveled across the United States and to Europe in 1923, visiting France, Italy, England, Germany, Austria, Spain and Algeria for the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, using their Eldorado pencil.
Horter developed an interest in art collecting in 1913, when he purchased lithographs by Edouard Vuillard at the New York Armory show. Throughout the 1920s, Horter acquired artworks by modern artists, notably including over thirty works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), as well as paintings by Juan Gris (1887-1927), Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), as well as prints by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Maurice Denis (1870-1943) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945).
He was prolific during the 1920’s and took on a number of jobs as a freelance artist, including a commission by Lester Douglas, then art director for the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, to create a series of industrial drawings for the magazine Nation’s Business. Horter struggled financially during the Great Depression as commercial work became less available and took up teaching at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His change in finances required him to sell the majority of his art collection. Earl Horter died of a heart attack on March 29, 1940 at the age of 59.
The Whitney Museum gave a retrospective of his work in 1978 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art curated an exhibition of Horter’s works alongside works he had collected, entitled Mad for Modernism: Earl Horter and His Collection in 1999. His artwork is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Archival material, including correspondence, of Horter is held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.