Born in Gusenburg, Germany, near Trier, Mathias Alten is hailed as the foremost painter of Grand Rapids, Michigan and a second-generation Impressionist whose primary theme was agrarian labor. He was apprenticed to Joseph Klein, a decorative painter in Saint Wendel, Germany and worked on ceiling and wall decorations for churches and theaters.
At age 17, he emigrated with his family to Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was a major manufacturing center and vital art community. For two years, he worked for a decorator and received attention for decorating rathskellers with his paintings. He also ran a furniture decorating business and did fresco painting for churches and local businesses.
Meanwhile he studied with Edwin A. Turner, hoping to become a professional artist, and he first exhibited his work at the Michigan State Fair in 1896. Some of his earliest works are floral stilllife, a theme to which he continued to return; he also did figure and portrait painting, but his landscapes defined the direction of his work.
In 1898, he went to France and settled in Paris after spending time painting fishing scenes in Etaples, an artists’ colony on the French coast. He studied at the Academie Julian with Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens and won a gold metal for the best figure drawing. Interested in animal drawing, he attended classes at the veterinary school and then traveled extensively throughout France and Italy and other parts of Europe.
Returning to Grand Rapids, he seemed equally productive in oil paintings of landscapes, marines, portraits, florals and animals. He and Constant Fliermans opened a studio and art school together, and then on his own he pursued an active career as a a portrait and figure painter, and also did numerous murals. His figure paintings were unusual for that time because they were not elegant subjects but working class people straining their muscles.
From 1902, after spending time at the Old Lyme, Connecticut art colony, he became increasingly devoted to plein air rural landscape painting with sparkling sunlight and colors of Impressionism. Many of these works were agrarian labor scenes.
In the early 1900s, he had numerous visitors to his studio and had annual studio exhibitions. One of his foremost Grand Rapids collectors was George C Briggs, who purchased over 60 of his paintings. In 1910, Alten traveled abroad for a year, doing many rural scenes of Holland, and in New York, he saw paintings by and was much influenced by the Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla whose work became a lasting influence in subject matter and a palette that was more colorful and sunlit than his previous work. In 1912, he traveled in Spain, and much of his work from that time reflected Spanish subjects.
In 1921, he did figural illustrations for The Commonwealth magazine, but increasingly his livelihood came from portrait subjects. He also had a market for his paintings in California because of the skillful promotion of his daughter, who acted as agent for her father.
In 1927, he went to Taos, New Mexico and painted landscape and Indian figures in the established art colony there, and in 1929, he was painting in Laguna Beach, California, but worked primarily in Grand Rapids and Saugatuck as well as in coastal areas of Massachusetts. However, in 1934, he returned to California and did a series of mission views and then painted on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida.
He died in 1938.
