Earl Horter

Earl Horter was born in 1881 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and was raised in Philadelphia. He was a largely self-trained artist who spent most of his adult life and career in New York.

A superb draughtsman and technician, he was first employed as a commercial artist and learned engraving. Horter became a member of the Society of Illustrators in 1910. His work was primarily urban scenes of cityscapes and daily life, and in 1911 he released a collaborative book with Jerome Meyers and Joseph Pennell entitled “ An Illustrated Handbook of the City.” In 1910 Earl became a member of the Society of Illustrators, which was a group of illustrators that founded the group in 1901 with the vision that, “ The object of the Soci. In the 1920’s, he was on the staff of N.W. Ayer, the largest graphic design agency in Philadelphia. In 1916 Horter left New York to Philadelphia to work at N.W. Ayer and Sons. He also traveled to Europe several times, summered in Rockport, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1930’s, he taught at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and at Tyler School of Art.

In 1915, he was awarded a Silver Medal from the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The artist exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1932, where he was awarded the Etching Prize; and at the National Print Exhibition of the Philadelphia Print Club in 1933, and 1938, where he was awarded prizes in both years.

He died in 1940 and the Whitney Museum honored him with a retrospective exhibition in 1978. In 1999 the Philadelphia Museum of Art staged an exhibition of his own works together with works he had collected ("Mad for Modernism: Earl Horter and His Collection").