Richard Lorenz

Lorenz was born on 9 February 1858 in Voigtstedt, Thuringia, in the Kingdom of Prussia. Around age 15 he was sent to study in Weimar, at the Royal Academy of Art, also described as the Weimar Art School, where sources confirm he studied under Theodor Hagen and studied sculpture and drawing; he won the school's top honor, the Carl Alexander Prize, twice.

In 1886 he emigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was hired by the American Panorama Company to help paint large-scale public panoramas, including Battle of Atlanta and Jerusalem on the Day of the Crucifixion. In 1888 he became director of the Wisconsin School of Design. He exhibited internationally and nationally, including in Munich in 1891, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, at the Paris Salon in 1901, and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and he showed regularly at the Art Institute of Chicago and with the Western Society of Artists. In 1906 he won the Osborn Prize at the Art Institute of Chicago for the best painting of an American subject.

Lorenz died in Milwaukee on 4 August 1915, after suffering a stroke; some sources give the date as 3 August 1915, and this small discrepancy has not been fully resolved across sources. In 2005 he was posthumously awarded a Wisconsin Visual Art Achievement Award. His best-known painting, Burial on the Plains, is held by the American Museum of Western Art in Denver.

Readers researching this name should note that other, unrelated artists have also worked under the name Richard Lorenz, including a twentieth-century art conservator and curator named Richard A. Lorenz (died 2001) and a contemporary painter who works under the same name today. This profile concerns only the Western genre painter described above.

Historical sources describe Lorenz as a significant figure in American Western genre painting, known for his horses and frontier subjects, per the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. No verbatim, attributable critical reviews from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile, and comparative rankings against other named Western painters could not be verified against primary sources.

Lorenz's work is tracked primarily through Western-art specialist auctions. The highest reported price is USD 504,000 for The Last Farewell at Christie's New York in 2022, per MutualArt's market summary, though the exact sale date and a second corroborating source have not been confirmed. Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, the leading specialist venue for American Western art, has publicly reported two different results for the same painting, Two Scouts, USD 168,000 and USD 280,000, and this discrepancy has not been resolved. Artprice records 127 auction appearances for Lorenz, mostly paintings, indicating a modest but sustained secondary market concentrated among Western art buyers rather than the broader contemporary art trade.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Lorenz, and no gallery or estate currently holds exclusive representation of his work; pieces circulate through Western-art specialist auction houses such as Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, Heritage Auctions, and Christie's. Because the name Richard Lorenz is shared by at least one other deceased professional (an art conservator who died in 2001) and by a living contemporary artist, buyers should confirm attribution to the 1858 to 1915 Western painter specifically, ideally through provenance tied to known Milwaukee-era or Western-genre subject matter, before purchase.