Volkert was born in Cincinnati in 1871, the son of a hat merchant from the Alsace.  After public school education, he went to the Cincinnati Art Academy, where he came under Frank Duveneck’s powerful influence.  In 1899, Volkert set out for New York and slowly evolved his own unique style combining “Barbizon” romanticism with the vibrant colors of Impressionism with Duveneck influenced draftsmanship.

To escape the city, Volkert fell in with a sympathetic colony of artists working during the summer in Old Lyme, Connecticut at the home of Miss Florence Griswold.  The bucolic scenes of the surrounding countryside captured his heart and his depictions of cattle and ploughmen in the fields were to become his trademark.

Volkert’s farm paintings capture a rural America that was largely extinct by 1922, the year he bought a house and settled permanently in Lyme. Automobiles, tractors, concrete fixtures and barbed wire fences have no place among his romantic compositions. Even though his subjects were simple his nostalgic heart and skillful hand transcended their ordinariness. The laboring farmer and his team and set in a bright but comforting light. In so many of his paintings, Volkert used his talent as a way of communicating the joy of a simpler life at a simpler time.

Adapted from an article by John Fleischman in Ohio Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 10, January, 1985.