Albert Herter was an American painter, illustrator, muralist, and interior designer. He was born in New York City, studied at the Art Students League with James Carroll Beckwith, then in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and Fernand Cormon.
He came from an artistic family; his father, Christian Herter (1839–1883), had co-founded Herter Brothers, a prominent New York interior design and furnishings firm. Herter Brothers closed its doors in 1906, and Albert founded Herter Looms in 1909, a tapestry and textile design-and-manufacturing firm that was, in a sense, successor to his father's firm.
In Paris, he met a fellow American art student, Adele McGinnis. They were married in 1893 and had three children: Everit Albert (1894–1918), Christian Archibald (1895–1966), and Lydia Adele (1898–1951). The couple honeymooned in Japan, then returned to Paris for the first years of their marriage. In 1898 they moved back to the United States and built a Mediterranean-style villa, called "The Creeks", in East Hampton, New York, with a studio for each of them. Herter's mother built a mansion, "El Mirasol," in Santa Barbara, California, where the family spent the winters. Following his mother's death, Herter and his wife renovated the mansion and converted it into a boutique hotel. Son Everit and daughter Lydia also became artists although Everit was killed at age 24 in World War I. Son Christian became a politician, serving as governor of Massachusetts and later U.S. Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Adele Herter was a founding member of New York City's Cosmopolitan Club, and is remembered as a painter of still lifes and "Society" portraits.
Herter had an extraordinary early career, at age 19 receiving an honorable mention at the Paris Salon (1890, La Femme de Buddha), and winning prizes from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1897 Lippincott Prize, Le Soir), the American Watercolor Society (1899 Evans Prize, The Gift of Roses), and elsewhere. He was awarded medals at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition (1830, The Muse), the 1897 Nashville Exposition (The Muse), the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle (Sorrow), and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (Gloria, The Danaides).
He painted covers for the Ladies' Home Journal and other magazines, and illustrated a number of books. He created several World War I posters.
Frontispiece—Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic, 1899.
Pryderi and Rhiannon from Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic.
Merlin and Vivian from Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic.
King Arthur from Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic.
Maiden of the brazen door from Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic.
Demon hand from Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic.
1917 poster for the Red Cross.
1918 poster for the YMCA.
In 1909, Herter was commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution to create what was intended to be the world's largest painted theater curtain, for the Denver Auditorium. The flat curtain was 35 feet (11 m) high and 60 feet (18 m) wide. Its theme was an allegory of the United States Declaration of Independence, and included illustrations of historical figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.
He executed murals for buildings such as the Massachusetts Statehouse, the Wisconsin State Capitol, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the National Academy of Sciences.
His best-known work, Le Départ des poilus, août 1914 (Departure of the Infantrymen, August 1914), is a mural in the Gare de Paris-Est railroad station in Paris. The Herters' elder son, Everit, volunteered to fight in World War I, and was killed in June 1918. Herter channeled his grief into this mural, which depicts soldiers leaving for war from that same railroad station. The young man at center with his arms in the air is a portrait of Everit, the woman in white at far left is a portrait of Adele Herter, and the man at far right with the bouquet of flowers is a self-portrait. Herter donated the mural to the People of France in 1926.
"Though a painter by profession, Mr. Herter has a keen appreciation of tapestry texture, which he has developed by personal work at the loom. Especially interesting should be the set of 26 panels now on the looms, picturing The Story of New York back to the days when Peter Stuyvesant smoked his long-stemmed pipe and cursed in Dutch."
Herter designed Spanish Colonial Revival interiors for the Loew's Warfield Theater (1923) in San Francisco, including a bullfighting mural above the proscenium. He designed Byzantine Revival interiors for Broadway's Martin Beck Theatre (1924) in New York City, which was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003.
In 1894, as a wedding gift from the groom's mother, Mary Miles Herter, the couple received a 70-acre (280,000 m2) parcel of land between Montauk Highway and Georgica Pond, in East Hampton, Long Island. In 1899, they built "The Creeks," a 40-room, Mediterranean-style villa, designed by architect Grosvenor Atterbury. The estate featured about a mile of waterfront on the tidal estuary. The villa contained "his and hers" artist studios so each would have their own workspace. Adele Herter designed the extensive gardens. In 1912, Albert Herter built a larger studio, a soaring 56-by-35-foot space that doubled as a private theater, "where Enrico Caruso, Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova performed."

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