Known primarily as an etcher and illustrator, Otto Henry Bacher first studied painting with DeScott Evans (1847-1898) in his native Cleveland, Ohio. During the late 1870s he went to Europe and studied at the Royal Academy in Munich with the American painter Frank Duveneck (1848-1919), and at the Academie Julian in Paris. Bacher was one of the American students known as "Duveneck's Boys" who accompanied Duveneck to Venice in 1880. There he met James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), with whom he shared his etching press. Bacher reminisced about his experiences during these years in his book With Whistler in Venice (1909). Bacher spent the majority of his career in New York, and visited Venice once again in the late 1880s. He exhibited his Venetian subjects, which occupied an important place in his oeuvre, at the Royal Academy in London in 1882, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1883, and at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1884 and 1888.

Biography courtesy of Schwarz Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/schwarzphila