Edward Steichen - Early Life

Early Life

Steichen was born Éduard Jean Steichen in Bivange, Luxembourg, the son of Jean-Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen. Jean-Pierre Steichen initially immigrated to the United States in 1880. Marie Steichen brought the infant Eduard along once Jean-Pierre had settled in Chicago, in 1881. The family, with the addition of Eduard's younger sister Lilian, moved to Milwaukee in 1889, when Steichen was 10.

In 1894, at the age of fifteen, Steichen began a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. After hours he would sketch and draw, and began to teach himself to paint. Having come across a camera shop near to his work, he visited frequently with curiosity until he persuaded himself to buy his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895. Steichen and his friends who were also interested in drawing and photography pooled together their funds, rented a small room in a Milwaukee office building, and began calling themselves the Milwaukee Art Students League. The group also hired Richard Lorenz and Robert Schade for occasional lectures.

Steichen was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1900, and signed the naturalization papers as Edward J. Steichen; however, he continued to use his birth name of Eduard until after the First World War.

Read more about this topic:  Edward Steichen

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except one’s own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?
    —Gerald Early (20th century)

    O! the one Life within us and abroad,
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)