Art Studio

Not only was Fourth Avenue a preferred location for banks and corporate offices, it also attracted artists who hoped to sell their paintings to the wealthy industrialists and financiers who worked here. The old banking houses that were here before they were replaced by skyscrapers — or in this case, a parking garage — had top floors with abundant natural light that were ideally suited as art studios.

The one here was an elegant three-story structure built in 1887 for the Pittsburgh Bank for Savings. The banking quarters on the ground floor would have appealed to someone who appreciated fine decorative art, with Renaissance-styled murals on the walls and high ceiling and an exquisitely carved cherry wood counter.

On the third floor was the studio of George Hetzel, a painter who specialized in wilderness scenes of streams and woods that he and his followers painted outdoors in the Appalachian Mountains. It became a regular meeting place for other artists, including Marvin Leisser, who occupied it after Hetzel retired to a farmhouse in Somerset County.

While the original artists of Fourth Avenue departed long ago, you can visit a new public art gallery just across the street in the Benedum-Trees Building.

George Hetzel

The youngest of five children in an immigrant family who came to Pittsburgh from the German-speaking region of Alsace in France, George Hetzel showed such skill as an apprentice sign painter that he was asked to help paint decorative murals in riverboats and saloons. After a year away at art school in Dusseldorf, Hetzel returned to Pittsburgh and began working in oils.

The woods and streams along the Allegheny Ridge in a place known as Scalp Level were a favorite subject of Hetzel after he first found it on a fishing trip. His works were exhibited in New York and Washington; one of the first canvases Henry Clay Frick bought was a Hetzel landscape. Hetzel's daughter, Lila, also became an accomplished painter, with her own studio on this stretch of Fourth Avenue now occupied by the parking garage.

Martin Leisser

In a meeting of artists in Hetzel’s studio in 1892, Martin Leisser was named chairman of a new Pittsburgh Art Society formed to promote the work of local painters. Leisser studied art in Paris and Munich and also had a studio on Fourth Avenue, where he painted natural landscapes as well as portraits of the nouveau riche capitalists and their well-to-do wives.

Leisser was also headmaster of the Design School for Women, a local institution that was founded to train women how to make designs and patterns for textiles and wallpaper but changed course to offer fine arts and figure drawing.

Andrew Carnegie sat for Leisser in 1907, but fussed so much that Leisser finally instructed the steel tycoon to read a newspaper and painted him that way. The artist also successfully lobbied Carnegie to include a school of painting in his new institute, now Carnegie Mellon University.