35.5 x 52.5 cm
Watercolor on paper
1909
35 x 52 cm
Watercolor on paper
1909
26 x 40 cm
Watercolor on paper
1898
Arrival in Mexico
Sources do not fully agree on the exact date: some indicate that he arrived in Mexico City in 1887, after participating for several years in the German Salons, and that he remained in the country until 1918, when he returned to his homeland. Other sources place his arrival in 1890. In any case, few reliable details exist about his private life, since he is considered part of the group of foreign «traveling artists» — alongside names such as Conrad Wise Chapman, Daniel Thomas Egerton, Carl Nebel, and Paul Fischer — who came to Mexico in the 19th century seeking recognition in a land that, for Europe, was exotic and little known.
His great obsession: the volcanoes
Once settled in the Valley of Mexico, Löhr became deeply captivated by Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, which became the central subject of much of his output. These two volcanoes were, in fact, a favorite theme among the traveling painters of the era, and the Mexican collections that preserve his work describe them as «his favorite views».
Style and technique
Löhr worked mainly in oil and watercolor, with a romantic, dramatic sensibility built from strong contrasts of light and shadow. His painting combines two registers: meticulous realism in the texture of rocks, vegetation, and buildings, alongside a more romantic, atmospheric treatment of skies and areas of shadow. Unlike Mexican landscape painters of the period (such as José María Velasco), Löhr brought a European imagination to his reading of the landscape, paying close attention to details that would have seemed «extravagant» to the local eye: peasant figures, animals, huts, and scenes of everyday life that coexist with the immensity of the mountains, visually reinforcing the scale of the landscape.
Legacy
Today his work is held in private and institutional Mexican collections (he is mentioned alongside painters such as Daniel Thomas Egerton, Conrad Wise Chapman, and Carl Nebel in exhibitions devoted to nineteenth-century landscape painting). Beyond their aesthetic value, his paintings are also considered a historical document: they record what the Valley of Mexico looked like — its people, its customs, and its natural surroundings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seen through the eyes of a European captivated by a landscape that was entirely new to him.