AUGUST LOHR (1842-1919)

Born in Hallein, near Salzburg, Austria.

The son of a soapmaker, Lohr came to Munich in 1863 in order to become a student at the Munich Academy. While in Munich he became active as a landscape painter specializing in Alpine scenes painted in Bacaria, Switzerland, and western Austria. Between 1879 and 1881 Lohr, like Franz Biberstein, assisted the Munich art professor Ludwig Braun in painting a panoramic view of the Battle of Sedan. Lohr is also reported to have been involved in the production of two similar battle panoramas painted under Braun's direction, scenes of the battles of Weissenburg and St. Privat. Later he did studies for a panorama of the Battle of Mars La Tour which was eventually exhibited in Leipzig. Lohr's last known painting form his Munich period is dated 1883. By 1884 he was in New Orleans, where he had come to help supervise the installation of a German panorama at the Cotton Exposition. He subsequently signed a contract with William Wehner to establish the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee. He assembled a team of German artists and together with Friedrich Heine directed the production of the Atlantic Cyclorama in 1885-86. Together with the panorama painters Hermann Michalowski and Bernhard Schneider, he contributed mural decorations to the Kuenslter Hem, a tavern near the Wells Street panorama studio which was a regular meeting place for the panorama artists. Lohr's contributions were a view of Munich and a painting of the Bay of Naples. From 1887 to 1890 Lohr was in partnership with Heine in the firm of Lohr and Heine, which took over the Wells Street studio from the American Panorama Company, In 1887 the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that Lohr and Heine were nearing completion of a panoramic painting of the Crucifixion.

Later that same year he accompanied Richard Lorenz to San Francisco to help in the installation of a panorama there. In 1889 the Sentenel reported that he was the manager of a company which was thinking of exhibiting panoramas in Mexico. This was probably the short-lived Milwaukee Panorama Company, for which Lohr was VP in 1890. Although his name appears in the 1890 Milwaukee city directory, he probably left Milwaukee for Mexico in 1890. A painting of the Chapultepec Castle was exhibited at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City in 1891. In 1899 Lohr was back in San Francisco to exhibit landscapes of Mt. Tamalpais, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Mexico at the Mechanics Institute Fair. A small watercolor sent by Lohr from Mexico in 1912 indicates that he was still living there at that time.

August Lohr biography courtesy Peter C. Merrill, German-American Artists in Early Milwaukee, A Biographical Dictionary.