Stow Wengenroth (1906–1978)

Stow Wengenroth was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 25, 1906, to Frederick Wengenroth, an architect, and Isabelle Stow, a textile designer. He began his artistic training at the Art Students League in 1923 under George Bridgman, and continued at the Grand Central School of Art with Wyman Adams. He later studied with printmaker George Miller, who introduced him to the lithographic techniques that would come to define his career.

Wengenroth devoted himself almost entirely to lithography, eschewing color in favor of a mastery of shadow, light, and form. This approach earned him the admiration of contemporaries, including the realist painter Andrew Wyeth, who called him "America's greatest living artist working in black and white." Wengenroth first traveled to Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in the early 1930s, and the region — with its rocky shoreline, fishing harbors, and small-town character — became a lasting source of inspiration. He would go on to become one of its most celebrated printmakers, producing over 340 lithographs across his career, many centered on the towns of Gloucester and Rockport, as well as the wider New England landscape and coastline. His urban scenes of Manhattan and the surrounding New York area are also especially prized by collectors today.

Wengenroth's talent was widely recognized during his lifetime. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1938, and a full Academician in 1941, and was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1942. He received more than thirty print prizes over the course of his career, including honors from the Philadelphia Print Club, the Salmagundi Club, the Audubon Artists, and the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. He was also an active member of numerous artist societies, including the Salmagundi Club, the Rockport Art Association, and the Society of American Graphic Artists. In 1936, he authored Making a Lithograph, an influential book on the medium.

In 1974, Wengenroth became a year-round resident of Rockport, Massachusetts, following his marriage to his second wife, Harriet Matson, a former curator of the Rockport Art Association. Late in life, after the death of his first wife in 1970, he returned to watercolor for the first time since the 1920s, producing a small but notable body of work in the medium. Stow Wengenroth died on January 22, 1978, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His lithographs remain in the collections of most major American museums, including the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.