He was born in New York City, studied at the Art Students League with James Carroll Beckwith, then in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and Fernand Cormon.

Its theme was an allegory of the United States Declaration of Independence, and included illustrations of historical figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

He executed murals for buildings such as the Massachusetts Statehouse, the Wisconsin State Capitol, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the National Academy of Sciences.

[1] His best-known work, Le Départ des poilus, août 1914 (Departure of the Infantrymen, August 1914), is a mural in the Gare de Paris-Est railroad station in Paris.

Especially interesting should be the set of 26 panels now on the looms, picturing The Story of New York back to the days when Peter Stuyvesant smoked his long-stemmed pipe and cursed in Dutch.

"[31] Herter designed Spanish Colonial Revival interiors for the Loew's Warfield Theatre (1923) in San Francisco, including a mural of Spanish-style dancers above the proscenium.

In 1894, as a wedding gift from the groom's mother, Mary Miles Herter, the couple received a 70-acre (280,000 m2) parcel of land between Montauk Highway and Georgica Pond, in East Hampton, Long Island.

In 1912, Albert Herter built a larger studio, a soaring 56-by-35-foot space that doubled as a private theater, "where Enrico Caruso, Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova performed.

Here is a large, rambling house, built so close to the sea that the blue-green of the water and the clear blue of the sky are deliberately considered as a part of the color plan.

Ossorio used the house as a gallery to display art collections and worked for 20 years in the gardens landscaping with exotic conifer species in groves dotted with his brightly colored found object sculptures.

Adele and Albert Herter spent a good deal of their time in California at "El Mirasol", his mother's estate in Santa Barbara, bought in 1904.

Mary Miles Herter had entertained friends there, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's widow Fanny Vandegrift (who later retired to and died at "El Mirasol" in 1914.

[36] Following the death of Albert's mother in 1913, the estate received a new round of renovation in 1914 with its conversion into "El Mirasol Hotel"; Herter expanded the mansion and added 15 luxurious bungalows around the gardens.

[38] The hotel was famed not only for its balanced design and private tranquility but for its wealthy guests including the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, and the heirs of Charles Crocker, J. P. Morgan and Philip Danforth Armour.

In the playbill, he acknowledged the writings of Lily Adams Beck for inspiring the Orientalist theme and "much of its imagery," and said that he also used several lines written by Rabindranath Tagore and Ananda Coomaraswamy.