Louise Wueste

Louise Heuser Wueste was born in Gummers bach, on the Rhine, Germany in 1803. In Germany she lived in an art center among such artists as Shroeder and Lessing. Her two sisters married these artists and she studied with both of them. Her father Daniel Heuser of Gummersbach, was a chemist. She  married Peter William Leopold Wueste who was a doctor who received his medical education in Weilburg 1809-1812. He died when their 3 children were very young.

Years passed then she came to San Antonio to be with her marred children who had preceded her, Mrs. Heino Staffel, and Daniel Wueste. She lived on Alamo St. and taught art-oil painting and drawing. While in San Antonio she painted many portraits such as Mrs. Sarah Eager Ollie French, Kate Schlickum and others. In later years she moved to Eagle Pass to be with her son who had a large mercantile business there on the Texas-Mexico frontier. She died in Eagle Pass, Texas in the year 1875.

Bibliography:
Wueste, Louise Heuser DRT Library

Louise Heuser Wueste was born in Gummersbach, Germany, on June 6, 1805, she is the daughter of Heinrich Daniel Theodor and Louise (Jügel) Heuser. Her father had a successful business in manufacturing and importing  paints, and her sisters married Karl Friedrich Lessing and Adolph   Schroedter. Wueste studied portraiture with Friedrich Boser and Karl Ferdinand Sohn, both eminent artists of the Düsseldorf Academy, a recognized center for realistic, historical narrative painting.   Louise married Peter Wilhelm Leopold Wueste, a physician, in 1824 and had three children before his death at the age of thirty-seven. After that she  resumed her art career as a teacher of portraiture.  In 1859 she followed her son and two daughters to Texas and opened her studio in San Antonio in 1860.  She was  the first professional woman artist and portrait  painter in San Antonio and western Texas during the 1860s and 1870s.

During the  Civil War she moved to Piedras Negras, Mexico, to live with her
son. She received few commissions for work her first years in North America. After 1865, however, she found many opportunities-painting and teaching art classes in one of her studios.                      She also taught in the local German-English school. Most of her  paintings are formal portraits, including those of her family and  friends, although she also rendered landscapes in pencil. Particularly  interesting were her sympathetic pencil and oil portraits of children,                       including her own grandchildren, pictured in mid-nineteenth century costume, in the Biedermeier manner.

Louise Wueste periodically left  San Antonio after the mid-1860s to live elsewhere in Texas with her  children, including her son, Daniel, an Eagle Pass merchant. Her later  work reflected an interest in the people and landscapes along the Rio Grande. Wueste died on September 25, 1874, in Eagle Pass and  was buried in a local military cemetery. Her paintings were sometimes signed with her monogram, "LW," and none was dated. Her work, possibly numbering in the hundreds, has never been  cataloged. Most of it is held by descendants and private collectors. The largest public collection of her output is owned by the San  Antonio Museum Association.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Pauline A. Pinckney, Painting in Texas: The Nineteenth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).