Oscar E. Berninghaus - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Oscar Berninghaus was born on October 2, 1874 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father ran a lithography business, which stimulated an interest in watercolor painting in Oscar, who began by sketching the St. Louis riverfront. Later he worked from tales he heard from trappers and cowboys passing through, and developed a fascination with the American Old West.

As an artist, Berninghaus was largely self-taught. By 1886, he was an accomplished watercolorist. He developed an interest in business and sold his works to tourists and newspapers. At sixteen, he had quit school and taken a job with Compton & Sons, a local lithography company, where he learned the technical details of engraving, color separation and printmaking. In 1893, he left Compton & Sons and joined Woodward and Tiernan, one of the largest printing concerns in the world at the time.

Berninghaus attended night classes at Washington University in St. Louis and sketched and painted in his spare time.

Read more about this topic:  Oscar E. Berninghaus

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.
    Walter Pater 1839–1894, British writer, educator. originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Aug. 1878)

    The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
    June Jordan (b. 1939)