mixed media water color 16 x 12 in.
Before the Dance by Benjamin Stahl
Benjamin Albert Stahl was a painter and illustrator, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, lived in Weston, Connecticut in the 1940s and 1950s, and then settled in Sarasota, Florida. There he was Vice President of the Sarasota Art Association.
He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then became a magazine and book illustrator whose publications included American Artist, Saturday Evening Post, Magazine World, the anniversary edition of Gone With The Wind and Blackbeard’s Ghost. Commissions included the depiction of the fourteen stations of the cross for the Catholic Bible and Catholic Press in Chicago in 1955.
He taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and was a founding faculty member of the Famous Artists School in Westport, Connecticut.
———————————————————————
Note from Jean Troemel, Augustine, Florida:
Ben Stahl lived in San Miguel Allende, Mexico the last years of his life. Before that he lived and worked in Sarasota, Florida, where he also built a circular museum building that housed his collection of large paintings illustrated for a later version of “The Bible”. Still a mystery, the museum was broken into and the collection stolen and never recovered. His wife was his favorite model.
