Lee Gaskins' AT THE FAIR The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair
Web Design and Art/Illustration copyrighted 2008
Jules Guerin was born in St Louis, Missouri on November 18, 1866 and moved to Chicago to study art in 1880. Later he studied with Benjamin-Constant and Jean Paul Laurens.
Returning to America, he began his career as an artist illustrating books. It is likely that these designs are based on his own travels through North Africa and Palestine. The designs that he did then as well as his ability to romantically depict exotic peoples and places brought forward many comnissions for murals.
As with many of the artists of his time Guerin took an active part in the international expositions of his day, showing at the Paris Expo 1900, where he received an honorable mention, the Pan American Expo in Buffalo, New York, 1901, the Louisiana Purchase Expo held in St Louis in 1904 at which he won a silver medal, and the Lewis & Clark Expo in Portland, Oregon in 1905. In 1915, Guerin was asked to serve as color co-ordinator of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. Jules had a one man show at the University of California, Berkeley two years later, followed by several large murals in the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco.
In 1903, he travelled to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and painted "Pittsburgh as Hell with the Lid Off" for Lincoln Steffens, a renouned Muckraker. Lincoln Steffens mentions this in his autobiography.
In 1912, when architect Henry Bacon began working on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., he hired Guerin to create renderings of his proposed designs. After he received the commission, Bacon retained Guerin to paint the two large murals, Reunion and Emancipation, that decorate the interior of the memorial.
