Inside Louis Grell’s Sketchbooks: 145 Drawings and the Artist’s Creative Process

The Grell Spiral Sketchbooks Collection (Romano–Schmidt)
Acquired April 2025 | Drawings dating from the 1930s through the 1950s

In April 2025, The Richard Grell Archival Collection acquired six spiral-bound sketchbooks containing approximately 145 original drawings by Louis Grell, along with loose studies and a separate early portrait drawing. The acquisition provides a remarkable opportunity to examine the artist’s creative process, from his earliest compositional ideas to the finished oil paintings.

Most of the sketchbook sheets measure approximately 9 × 12 inches, with individual drawings commonly measuring 8 × 10⅞ inches. The collection consists primarily of graphite drawings, many with gouache highlights, and includes numerous watercolors. Several drawings are signed or marked with variations including “L G,” “L. GRELL,” “GRELL,” and an intertwined L and G.

The subjects range from landscapes, portraits, and figure studies to elaborate narrative, religious, and fantasy compositions. Many correspond to completed paintings, while others document works that have not yet been located or identified.

From Sketch to Finished Painting

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the collection is the opportunity to compare Grell’s preliminary drawings directly with his completed oil paintings.

Among the identified compositions are The Prodigal Son, Over the Hump, Hunt of Diana II, Favorite Swimming Hole, Windy Walk, and Cabin in Meadow. Additional comparisons include landscapes, religious subjects, and imaginative compositions such as Dante’s Inferno.

These comparisons reveal how Grell refined his compositions, repositioned figures, developed landscapes, and transformed graphite studies into fully realized paintings.

In The Prodigal Son, the central relationship between father and son survives from drawing to painting, but the arrangement of the figures, the background, and the lighting undergo considerable development. In Over the Hump, the principal action remains recognizable while Grell revises the figures, wagon, horse, and surrounding landscape.

The sketchbooks therefore preserve more than finished ideas. They document the decisions through which Grell arrived at his final compositions.

Grell’s Handwritten Instructions

One of the collection’s most unusual features is Grell’s extensive use of handwritten descriptions, titles, and color instructions.

Frequently written on opposing pages, these notes describe the atmosphere, lighting, seasonal conditions, and colors he intended to introduce into a painting.

Among his instructions are:

• “Warm Afternoon Sunshine”
• “Hot Autumn Noon Sun”
• “warm greens”
• “violet shadows”
• “violet skies”

Other passages specify combinations of gold, yellow, brown, orange, and green, demonstrating the precision with which Grell considered the visual atmosphere of a composition.

These written instructions offer a rare glimpse into the artist’s working methods. Long before applying oil paint to canvas, Grell was recording not only what he intended to depict, but how the finished scene should feel.

Several sketches also contain German-language annotations, including an inscription associated with Dante’s Inferno.

The sketchbooks further preserve numerous titles written by Grell himself. These discoveries have helped identify previously untitled works and clarify the titles of existing paintings.

A Documented History: James Romano and Tree Studios

The acquisition is accompanied by an important signed letter from Chicago artist and dealer James Romano, dated January 5, 2006, on Tree Studio Gallery Art Antiques stationery.

Romano was a former resident of Grell’s Tree Studios apartment. In his letter, he states that he purchased the Brudno sketchpads directly from Mrs. Grell and the attorney handling the Grell estate. He identifies the drawings as dating from the 1930s through the 1950s.

This dating is significant. Although many of the completed paintings identified through the sketchbooks belong to the 1950s, Romano’s account establishes a broader period for the collection. Individual drawings should therefore be dated according to their own evidence rather than assigned collectively to Grell’s final decade.

Romano also records that he lived in Grell’s apartment during the 1960s and purchased the sketchbooks together with approximately 25 major Grell paintings. He states that many of those paintings subsequently entered major collections, including works associated with the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the ceiling of the Chicago Theatre.

His signed statement provides an unusually direct account of the dispersal of artwork remaining in Grell’s studio after the artist’s death in 1960.

The original letter, its accompanying envelope, and correspondence from the collection’s subsequent owner, Larry Schmidt, have been preserved with the sketchbooks.

Schmidt acquired the six sketchbooks from Romano in January 2006. In later correspondence, Schmidt described his efforts to match individual drawings with finished paintings reproduced on LouisGrell.com. His observations helped establish connections between the sketchbooks and several known works.

Personal Traces of the Artist

Beyond their artistic importance, the sketchbooks preserve small but revealing details of Grell’s personal life.

Inside one older sketchbook, Grell wrote his name and Chicago address: “L. Grell, 3 E. Ontario St., Chicago ILL.”

Another cover contains a handwritten reference to Beethoven’s Sextet in B-flat. Grell was an enthusiastic listener to classical music and reportedly owned more than 2,000 records. The musical notation offers a personal glimpse into the environment in which he worked.

Dozens of studies of trees, plants, hands, and human faces appear throughout the collection. Some were evidently intended for larger compositions, while others may have served as independent exercises or preparations for mural projects.

Nature Reimagined: The Purple Cow Murals

Beginning in 1939, Grell carried his lifelong fascination with trees, flowers, and imaginative landscapes into one of his most unusual undertakings: the Purple Cow restaurants of the Albert Pick hotel chain. Across a nationally distributed program of oil-on-canvas murals, Grell created a fanciful natural world populated by anthropomorphic cows, including characters adapted from Disney’s Clarabelle Cow and Ferdinand the Bull. Trees became theatrical settings, their exaggerated trunks, twisting branches, and unusual foliage framing scenes of courtship, marriage, music, and everyday comedy. Flowers, mushrooms, and other vegetation contributed to an environment in which the ordinary laws of nature gave way to humor and fantasy. These were not isolated decorative pictures but components of a coordinated architectural experience, complete with rhyming captions and occasional public jingle contests. With 94 distinct mural compositions now documented photographically, the Purple Cow program demonstrates how Grell transformed his command of natural forms into an imaginative world designed to surround and entertain the public.

An Earlier Portrait: 1908

Accompanying the sketchbooks is a separate portrait study of an elderly man, possibly Grell’s maternal grandfather.

The drawing is believed to date from Grell’s return to Council Bluffs, Iowa, in early 1908, following his time in Salt Lake City and before his studies at the Munich Academy. During this period, Grell also produced a portrait study of his mother.

The portrait includes a principal head and a smaller facial profile to the right. It is executed in graphite and gouache on paper and signed in blue ink at the lower right, “L Grell 08.”

Sheet: 13 × 13 inches
Principal figure: Approximately 10 × 6 inches

The identification of the sitter remains tentative, but the signed date places the drawing among Grell’s early surviving portrait studies.

Rediscovering Grell’s Lost Compositions

The sketchbooks have already contributed to the identification of several known paintings and the recovery of titles previously unavailable to researchers.

They also contain numerous elaborate compositions for which corresponding finished paintings have not yet been located. Whether every such composition was ultimately executed remains unknown.

Together, the approximately 145 drawings provide a substantial record of Grell’s imagination and technical preparation across several decades.

For an artist whose career included easel paintings, murals, theatrical decoration, and architectural commissions, the survival of these working drawings is especially important. They allow viewers to follow the development of individual compositions and, in some cases, witness the transformation of a preliminary idea into a completed work of art.

The Grell Spiral Sketchbooks Collection is now preserved within The Richard Grell Archival Collection.

Collection provenance

Louis Grell (1887–1960); Friedl Grell, artist’s widow, 1960–c. 1970; James Romano, Chicago, c. 1970–2006; Larry Schmidt, Ohio, January 2006–April 2025; The Richard Grell Archival Collection, acquired April 2025.

Catalog notation

The following conventions distinguish the artist’s original inscriptions from subsequent archival identifications:

• “Text” — Wording written by Louis Grell.
• ‘Title’ — A title recorded by Grell.
• (Title) — A descriptive or estimated title assigned by LouisGrell.com.

Additional titles of known works were preserved through Grell family correspondence and recollections, including information passed from Louis Grell to his sister Helen.

Photographs of the sketchbooks have intentionally been left unretouched, with sheet edges and surrounding areas visible where appropriate to document their present condition.