Albert Lorey Groll
Albert Lorey Groll grew up in New York City and pursued his artistic education abroad, studying in Munich, Antwerp, and London. After returning to New York City, he decided to pursue landscape painting. Groll traveled to Arizona in 1904, followed by a trip to New Mexico in 1906. While he would go on to keep a studio in New York City, collectors in the east developed a taste for his western paintings, necessitating repeat visits to the deserts and pueblos of the region.
What is captivating about this scene?
Groll’s painting of Yellowstone’s Morning Glory Spring shows a well-known hot spring in the park’s Upper Geyser Basin. The pool was originally named in the 1880s by the wife of an assistant park superintendent, who called it Convolutus, after the Latin name for the bright blue flower that the pool resembles. Groll’s closely cropped image of the spring balances on the edge between topographical reporting and lyrical abstraction—perhaps making the pool’s resemblance to a flower even clearer.
Gift of Sewell C. Biggs in memory of Emestine McNear Nickel Carpenter