Life of Carl Ahrens
Early Years
Carl Henry von Ahrens was born on February 15, 1862, in Winfield, Ontario. His parents, Herman and Isabella Ahrens, separated soon after and Ahrens was raised by his father in Berlin (now Kitchener). His paternal family were among the first European settlers in Waterloo County. Several ancestors were prominent local businessmen, and most were devout members of the local Swedenborgian Church.
Multiple family members living under the same roof, including Ahrens' father, died of tuberculosis during his childhood. Ahrens himself contracted the disease around age seven. There being little chance of the boy surviving to adulthood, his family likely decided to embrace his daydreaming and mischief-making rather than attempt to shape him into a respectable man. Luckily for Ahrens, he suffered a serious injury to his hip around the time he fell ill; instead of settling in his lungs, the tuberculosis infected the injured joint. Some sources claim the injury was the result of being kicked by another little boy. The most persistent story, passed down through several generations, was that Ahrens, fascinated by birds, constructed a pair of wings and attempted to fly off a barn roof.
Ahrens was well known around Berlin as master prankster. His most memorable exploit, a story likely embellished over the years, was when Ahrens, then a teenager, was caught skinny dipping in the Grand River and, in fleeing from the authorities, ran stark naked through a Mennonite picnic.
Ahrens suffered periods of illness, sometimes dire ones, throughout his childhood. In between these bouts, he learned how to hunt, box, fish, canoe, sail, and dance. He walked with a limp, but did not, as doctors predicted, grow to be misshapen.
By 1878, Ahrens' family realized that he may live to see manhood after all, and a man needed a proper vocation. They sent him to Winnipeg to apprentice in a law firm owned by acquaintances.
Ahrens had other plans and escaped at the first opportunity.
He took up with an eccentric named Broadcloth Smith for a brief time, then held down a claim near Lesser Slave Lake, Alberta, over a particularly brutal winter. When the owner returned, Ahrens and a friend hiked to Fort Garry, getting caught in a spring blizzard along the way. They were lost for three days and without food for two. At Fort Garry, he had his first encounter with the local native tribes. One of the men saw Ahrens' injured feet, took pity, and offered his own moccasins.
While out west, Ahrens met Francis Dickens (son of author Charles Dickens) who was a Captain of the Northwest Mounted Police. He also befriended Calamity Jane in Dakota Territory. He held every available job except driving a stagecoach and was on such friendly terms with the local native tribes that they called him Lone Pine. He reportedly spent one harrowing afternoon in a buffalo hollow while two warring bands shot arrows at each other over his head.
After two years, Ahrens’ family insisted he return home to Ontario; they promptly put him to work at his uncle's button factory in Waterloo. The tedious and delicate process of dyeing buttons fascinated him. He later said that this job was his first step toward the mastery of color that distinguished him as a painter.
Eventually the family demanded that Ahrens have a real profession. Hearing no suitable suggestions from him, they packed him off him to Stratford to apprentice as a dentist under his uncle, Alfred Ahrens. He swiftly mastered everything Dr. Ahrens could teach, but without a degree he could not open a practice of his own in Ontario. There were no such restrictions in Nebraska, so he settled in Nebraska City and soon became one of the first dentists in the United States to use the rotary method to drill teeth. In 1887 the American Medical Congress invited him to Washington, D.C. for one of their meetings.
On an extended trip home to Ontario, Ahrens met and married Emily Marion Carroll. He brought his bride back to Nebraska, where their son, Carl Herman, was born.
Ahrens began painting in 1886, at the age of twenty-four, and within a year he gave up dentistry entirely. When Ahrens’ family heard of his decision, they turned their backs on him, hoping poverty would help him see reason. It didn't. He moved to Toronto and took a studio on Adelaide Street. By twenty-seven he was known as an up-and-coming artist, and his vast social circle included painters, journalists and actors. He was particularly close with the Mohawk recitalist and poet, Pauline Johnson.
An Artist Awakens
Ahrens had little formal art instruction. He worked alone, watching the methods of other painters but never copying them. He first exhibited with the Ontario Society of Artists in 1889. In 1891 he was elected Associate Painter by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1892 he studied painting under William Merritt Chase and sculpture under Francis Edwin Elwell in New York City. While there, he befriended George Inness, who became his mentor. Inness encouraged Ahrens to stop taking classes, go home, and paint how he wished to paint. Ahrens returned to Toronto, resigned from all professional associations and, while initially known for his portraits, turned almost exclusively to landscapes.
During the summer of 1896, Ahrens and his family lived near the Ojibwa reservation at Southampton, Ontario. The tribe’s children were fascinated by Ahrens, reportedly staring as if they had seen a ghost, but running away if he spoke to them. The chief's wife told Ahrens that he strongly resembled a son she had recently lost. After this she began calling Ahrens her son and he called her his Indian Mother. The family was welcomed onto the reservation, adopted by the tribe, and all received new names. Ahrens' was called Ahsabanang, the name of the lost son. It means "a cluster of stars".
In 1899, Ahrens met Elbert Hubbard, the founder of the famous Roycroft artist community in East Aurora, New York. Hubbard admired Ahrens' work, and when he learned Ahrens had experience making pottery, he asked Ahrens to join the Roycrofters and start a potter shop there. Ahrens moved to East Aurora with his wife, three children (Carl, Robert and Pauline) and his cousin, fellow painter Eleanor Douglas, in May of 1900. Hubbard, a businessman, and Ahrens, a craftsman, soon butted heads over what constituted a finished piece. Hubbard insisted the pottery be sold unglazed and, thus, unable to hold water. Hubbard’s patrons willingly bought anything that bore the Roycroft mark, but the pottery produced in the shop was of no value. No surviving pieces have been found.
Ahrens left the Roycroft community after only four months, but remained in East Aurora until 1905. While the potter shop was a failure, the experience was pivotal in Ahrens' life. It was at Roycroft that he met and fell in love with Martha Niles, a young artist and singer who illuminated books for the print shop. His marriage to Emily Carroll had been unhappy from the start, but in New York only the "wronged" party could file for divorce, and Emily refused. As soon as his sons were old enough to be self-supporting, he broke ties with his family and moved to New York City, reuniting with Martha, whom he always called Madonna, there.
Author George Wharton James, whom Ahrens met at Roycroft, offered Ahrens a commission to paint the old Spanish missions in California, intending to use the work as illustrations for a book on the subject. That divorce laws were more lenient out west may have played into Ahrens' decision to go. He and Madonna were obliged to pose as husband and wife for the better part of a year before they could make it legal.
With motor cars barred from the mountain roads, the pair travelled by covered wagon as far south as San Diego and then made their way north along the coast toward San Francisco. Madonna, raised in a comfortable middle-class family, faced a difficult change of circumstances while pregnant. According to her memoirs, Ahrens, an experienced camper, took on the responsibility of preparing all their meals and patiently taught her the practical survival skills of life on the road.
At the time of the 1906 earthquake, the pair were in Santa Barbara. While they certainly felt it, they did not encounter signs of devastation until they travelled farther north. The earthquake nearly bankrupted Ahrens’ patron. The intended book project had to be abandoned after only a few paintings were completed.
Ahrens and Madonna wintered in a bungalow in Corte Madera, where their son, Laird, was born. The family returned to Ontario in the summer of 1907, settling first in the village of Meadowvale, and then in Toronto.
Ahrens met Colonel (later Major-General) Malcolm Smith Mercer at an exhibition of his Meadowvale paintings. Mercer offered to purchase all paintings for the following three years, allowing Ahrens the financial and creative freedom to produce his best work. Ahrens' daughter, Penelope, was born in 1908 but died in 1910, less than a month before the birth of Sigrid Ahrens.
In 1911, Ahrens exhibited the Mercer Collection at the Public Reference Library in Toronto. People from many European galleries were there, one offering as much as $100,000 for the collection of 31 paintings. Mercer would not sell. The Belgian art commissioner invited the collection to Belgium for an exhibit, the first such offer made by any European country to a North American artist. The Great War started before arrangements could be finalized.
In 1912, Ahrens' youngest daughter, Chloris, was born in Lambton Mills. It was a happy time, free from poverty and worry, but this reprieve ended in 1914 when Mercer was sent to Europe to fight. In 1916, he was killed in battle.
Charles Burden and Col. George Naismith took over the role of patrons for Ahrens, but they demanded only small pieces, frustrating Ahrens, who was healthy enough to attempt larger works. In the summer of 1919, Ahrens' painting called The Glade was requested for an extended loan to Glasgow Galleries in Scotland. It remains there to this day.
Ahrens moved his family to Woodstock, NY in 1920. He taught landscape painting with Charles Etherington, while his wife, Madonna, trained in singing with Alfredo Barili, one of Atlanta's top composers. In 1921, the family moved with friends to Rockport, Massachusetts, where Ahrens painted seascapes for a short time. He again fell ill and longed for home, so they returned to Canada in the winter of 1922.
The family lived in a series of cheap houses in Toronto before finding their dream home, an old stone farm house in Galt, near Ahrens' boyhood hometown. They were able to afford this only because Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, an old friend of Ahrens, threatened to replace Sir Edmund Walker, the Chairman of the Art Advisory Committee, for his continued refusal to buy Ahrens' work for the National Gallery. Ahrens had made many enemies over the years, and Walker was the most vocal. Already unpopular for his refusal to join any associations and his knack for saying the wrong things to the wrong people, the scandal of Ahrens' divorce and remarriage was the final straw. While nothing today, divorce was considered morally repugnant at the time, especially in conservative Toronto. He endured constant accusations that his marriage to Madonna was not legal.
Ahrens named the new house Big Trees. He took on students, one of whom, Grant Macdonald, later became the official artist for the Royal Canadian Navy during WWII. The family entertained politicians, artists, musicians, poets, novelists, and professors. Ahrens' boyhood friend, painter Homer Watson, was a frequent guest.
Ahrens began experimenting with printmaking in 1925, constructing a printing press out of an old mangle and reworked dental tools. He burned his used metal plates in the fireplace to clean the flue. The printmaking process was laborious and he was not strong, so his daughters, Sigrid and Chloris, often helped with any heavy work.
Final Years
Ahrens' last years were full of illness and excruciating pain. The tubercular hip he had had since childhood left him with five constantly draining abscesses, a fused hip joint, and a perforated bowel. He went through long periods when he was confined to a chair, unable to either stand or lie down. In the end, his six foot frame was down to 85 pounds. He continued to paint to the end, and his last works are full of vibrant color.
Ahrens had two exhibitions in 1933, one at Cunningham's Studio (Hamilton, Ontario) and another in Montreal. His last exhibition was in March of 1935, shortly before he and Madonna left Galt for England, an arrangement they thought would be permanent. They were only able to stay four months before Ahrens had a series of strokes and wanted to return home.
Back in Toronto, penniless and desperate, Madonna wrote to Prime Minister Mackenzie King. King arranged for Ahrens to be taken care of for the last months of his life in the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital. He died on February 27, 1936 at the age of 74.
From left to right: Carl (1862–1936), Laird (1906–1986), Olive (wife of Laird), Madonna (1882–1976), Sigrid (1911–1998), Stephen (husband of Sigrid), Chloris (1912–1982) holding baby Nonna (1933–2021).