Oskar Gross

Born in Austria, Vienna and graduated in 1897 from Vienna Royal Academy of Fine Art. He studied in Paris and Munich 1898-1902. In 1901 he moved to New York City and in 1902 to Chicago where he lived and worked until he died in 1963.

Oskar Gross (1871-1963)

Born in Vienna, Austria, son of a prominent architect, Oskar Gross graduated with honors

from the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1896. Before graduation, he was already making a comfortable living as a portrait painter. In 1898, he won a commission to paint murals for the Hungarian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where architect Daniel Burnham discovered him and lured him to Chicago. Gross spent much of the first decade of the century painting murals in buildings designed by Burnham and Louis Sullivan, and then he shifted back to portrait painting and began to teach at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. One of his best-known works was a portrait of General Douglas McArthur (1942), commissioned by the Chicago Tribune. Near the end of his life, he was commissioned to paint the likeness of Iowa State professor Phineas Stephens Shearer for the Saddle & Sirloin Club, 1953.