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Alfred H. Maurer was born on April 21, 1868, the son of the Currier & Ives artist, Louis Maurer. He left school in 1884 to work in the family lithographic enterprise of Maurer and Heppenheimer. From 1885 until 1897 Maurer attended the National Academy of Design in New York where he studied under Edgar Ward. Maurer sailed for Paris in 1897 and embarked on a brief course of study at the Académie Julian. He resided in France from 1897-1901 and 1902-1914.
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Maurer officially launched his career in 1901 with fashionable Whistlerian and Chase-inspired fin-de-siècle portraits that garnered critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. He simultaneously created a body of genre work that chronicled life at Parisian cafés, dance halls, and along the shore. By 1906-07 Maurer had embraced the aesthetics of Fauvism and accordingly he executed his paintings with expressive brushwork and in a striking new palette of saturated hues. He exhibited his Fauve imagery in important international exhibitions including the 1907 Salon d'Automne; he debuted it in the United States in 1909 in a two-man exhibition with John Marin at Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery, "291."
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Prompted by wartime hostilities abroad Maurer returned to the United States in 1914. He resettled in New York and participated in a number of important exhibitions including the1916 Forum Exhibition held at Anderson Galleries. He exhibited regularly with the New York based Society of Independent Artists and was elected a director of this organization in 1919. In 1924 the New York dealer Erhard Weyhe bought the contents of Maurer's studio. He represented the artist for the remainder of his career.
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