Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, artist and Episcopal clergyman, was born in Bavaria and came to the United States in 1848. In 1851, he married Julia Adelaide Torrey (d. 1907), with whom he had four children. His works include decorations for the ceiling of the House of Representatives in the Capitol in Washington, D.C.; which was widely circulated in reproduction; and many religious paintings and wood carvings for churches. Oertel served as rector in Lenoir and Morganton, N.C.; Glen Cove, N.Y.; and Emmorton, Md.; and briefly operated a sawmill in Orange Springs, Fla. From 1895 to 1902, he painted a series of large canvases collectively called which he considered his highest achievement. Rock of Ages, Redemption, The collection is Oertel's diary, 386 p., with entries dated 1868 to 1882, and about sixty enclosures from the diary, including some twenty letters to Oertel and copies of letters from him to others, newspaper clippings, and writings, chiefly poems and sermons, by Oertel and others. Among the topics covered in diary entries are the difficulties Oertel experienced in balancing church duties and the creation of religious art; his poverty; his frustration with an art-buying public that appeared to prefer foreign to American religious art and portraits of themselves and paintings of animals to religious art in general; his annoyance with the art establishment in New York and other major centers and with art agents and publishers; his confrontations with church officials in North Carolina and New York; and his difficulties with parishioners, especially in Morganton. In these entries, there is much about Oertel's efforts to make his family comfortable, but little about the activities of individual family members, except for their involvement in the Orange Springs, Fla., sawmill venture. Few friends and acquaintances are named. Two who were involved in his work were William Cullen Bryant, whose poems Oertel illustrated, and Sarah Rebecca Cameron of Hillsborough, N.C., with whom Oertel was involved in an aborted effort to produce an illustrated volume of religious stories.
