HENRY KOEHLER PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY

HENRY KOEHLER

American, 1927-2018

BIOGRAPHY
Henry Koehler was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1927 and lived and worked in Southampton, New York. After graduating from Yale, he began his career as an illustrator and graphic designer working for such publications as Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, Town & Country and Vogue before taking up painting full-time in 1961. His subjects ranged from jockeys and racing to polo, fox hunting and fishing, sailing, dogs and other animals, and garden and still lives. He was a founder of the American Academy of Equine Art.

Henry Koehler’s first one-man show took place at the Country Art Gallery in Westbury, Long Island in 1961. It was attended by Joan Payson, the heiress and art collector, who subsequently commissioned the artist to paint a series of baseball paintings for her new team, the New York Mets and which were to hang in the Diamond Club dining room when Shea Stadium opened in 1964. Since then, Mr. Koehler exhibited widely throughout the United States, Ireland, England, South Africa, and France.

In 1974, the U.S. Postal Service selected Koehler to design a stamp honoring horse racing on the 100th running of the Kentucky Derby. “The elegance that his paintings confer," wrote Lorian Peralta-Ramos in her introduction to the catalogue for Koehler’s sixty-first one-man show at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 2003, “has been valued by distinguished collectors, including the Prince of Wales, Ralph Lauren, Paul Mellon, John Hay Whitney,” Malcolm Forbes, the Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy and many others.

Museum Collections
National Horseracing Museum, Palace House, Newmarket
National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, Saratoga Springs, NY
National Sporting Library & Museum, Middleburg, VA