Details — Click to read
A Note in Pattern depicts the interior of the De Soto Building at the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair. A landscape painter and etcher, Charles Dahlgreen was born in Chicago and in 1886, he traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany for two years of academic art study. In 1904 he studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then at the Art Institute of Chicago. Beginning in 1906, Dahlgreen’s landscape paintings and prints were included in the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions, which would regularly feature his work for almost four decades.
Following completion of his studies at the Art Institute, Dahlgreen returned to Europe to study. He exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salons in 1910 and in 1912, the year he returned to Chicago. In the 1930s, he stayed several times in Taos, New Mexico, joining a diverse community of artists. He exhibited widely, including in the Carnegie International and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibitions, but he remained closely affiliated with Chicago institutions and was a member of the Chicago Society of Etchers..
Although he painted until nearly the end of his life, Dahlgreen is better known as a printmaker with a masterful use of aquatint. He created popular, more traditional images of subjects ranging from western mountains and midwestern farmlands to more modernist contemporary cityscapes and Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition. Dahlgreen gave one hundred etched plates to the Smithsonian Institution, which holds in its permanent collection a rare impression of A Note in Pattern.
