Highly respected today, his work met with little critical or commercial success in his lifetime, and he died, a suicide, at the age of sixty-four.

In 1897, after studying with the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and painter William Merritt Chase, Maurer left for Paris, where he stayed the next four years, joining a circle of American and French artists.

[3] The painting received first prize at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition, whose jurors included Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer.

It was an honor that promised a bright future, and Maurer hoped it would convince his demanding and skeptical father that he could, in fact, paint.

His break from realism and new commitment to modernism, fostered by exposure to the art collected by his friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, subsequently cost him his international reputation and any hope of paternal regard.

He was friends with respected avant-garde American artists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin, almost all of whom were better known than he was.

In 1924, the New York dealer Erhard Weyhe bought the contents of Maurer's studio and represented the artist for the remainder of his career.

For some reason, Alfred was subsequently forced to return to New York, leaving behind in Paris his beloved boulevards and the friends of his heart.

The idea and the style of his work seemed to change; he turned to the painting of elongated women, after the pattern of Modigliani.

Between this unique rejuvenescence of his remarkable father, with the implied reproof against his own art, and the suffering due to ill health, the pit yawned and the unhappy Alfred Maurer left the scene of his sorrows a suicide, his gallant heart broken.

[12] Five years after Maurer's death, the art critic Henry McBride, reviewing a show of his work at the Hudson Walker Gallery in New York, wrote: "He lived exclusively for his art and in sharp contrast to most painters of today who never lift a paint brush to canvas without thought of the box office results....he had the courage of his principles.