The Artist

Edwin Hans Kiefer was the only one of the children born outside Detroit — at Port Huron, on 28 August 1860 — and he was named for Hans Christian Andersen.

He started as a lithographer at Detroit's Calvert Lithographing Company, became a watercolorist in New York painting magazine covers, and then went to Paris to learn to paint in oils. He set up a studio at Étaples, on the Channel coast, where an artists' colony had grown up.

There he painted a young local woman named Marie Aubert in a red blouse, reading. He called it The Letter, and according to the Saga it won a prize at the Paris Salon of 1890.

Edwin also painted the life-size portrait of his father that hung in the faculty room of the University of Michigan medical school, and a portrait of his mother the family called "the George Washington picture."

In 1912, in New York, he married Marie Aubert — the woman in the painting. They had no children, but Marie's niece Marinette lived with them. Edwin died in Detroit on 24 April 1931.

Where is The Letter today? We don't know. If you do, please tell us.