| Richard Florsheim | ||
| Birth Date: October 25, 1916 |
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| Death Date: 1979 Artist Gallery |
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| Born in Chicago in 1916, Richard Florsheim was a painter, sculptor and graphite artist most often known for his urban and marine scenes. He was a painfully shy child, channeling all his energies into straight-A scholarship and crude, gloomy art. His father reluctantly helped him get an art education in Europe during the 1930s, but before World War II Florsheim managed to sell just one painting.
In the Navy during the war, Florsheim developed a radar plane-spotting technique that is still considered basic. But at the end of the war, he was still faced with many problems in his art. He studied at the University of Chicago and later taught art at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee from 1949 to 1950 and the Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago from 1952 to 1963. Happily married and with an art teaching job to help make ends meet, he still felt and painted misery. But gradually the gloom lifted from his work and he began to sell until there came a time when everything he painted was snapped up.
He was an active member of the art community including the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Graphite Artists and serving as Trustee and Vice President of the Provincetown Art Academy and the Chicago Society Artists. Florsheim passed away in Chicago in 1979.
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