Conrad Schmitt

The calling began locally: at twelve he watched painters and stencilers transform his family’s parish church in Fussville and decided that was the work he wanted.

He was born in Fussville on April 20, 1867. The hamlet’s church was St. Anthony the Hermit; Menomonee Falls annexed Fussville in 1958, and the Lannon-stone parish walls of 1867 still stand on the hill. At fourteen his Bavarian-immigrant parents apprenticed him to Milwaukee church decorator Louis (also called Adolph) Loeffler, then made him sit through two years of business school—the piece that later let a studio compete with Tiffany on large interiors. He studied murals with Jan Sukaczynski and, in Rome, fresco and catacomb painting with Joseph Wilpert. In 1889 he founded Conrad Schmitt Studios in Milwaukee, with an early shop at 223 2nd Street. By twenty he was taking bishops, bankers, and big houses; he recruited European artisans and, in studio lore, once walked twelve miles through a snowstorm from his father’s home to keep a promise on the Milwaukee courthouse. The firm decorated St. Mary’s Cathedral in Winnipeg, the Milwaukee Public Library, and theaters and churches across the country, with later branches in New York and Washington in the 1930s.

Sons took over at his death on December 28, 1940. Artist Bernard O. Gruenke bought the firm in 1953. It still operates, now in New Berlin. The place claim is birth in Fussville—today’s Menomonee Falls—and a career that started in the Falls church that is still on the hill.