Our Historic Art
Come See a Piece of Milwaukee's Past
Miller High Life Theatre is home to six of Thorsten Lindberg’s iconic murals. Focusing on the earliest days of the city, the murals tell an important story of its industrial past and initial interactions with the Indigenous Peoples that called the land around Lake Michigan their home.
About Thorsten Lindberg
Thorsten Lindberg (1878 – 1949) studied art at the Royal Academy in Stockholm and studied architectural drafting and design at the Stockholm School of Applied Arts. He immigrated to the United States in 1900.
Thorsten Lindberg was an accomplished artistic craftsman and self-taught artist, nationally recognized for his technical skill in watercolor. Much of Lindberg’s work dating from the 1930s and early ’40s features historical subjects of national, statewide, and local significance.
Lindberg was a staff artist for many of the Works Project Administration’s (WPA) historical art projects for the Milwaukee County Historical Society, the Milwaukee Public Museum and the County Park system. Lindberg was selected to design and paint a series of murals that immortalize some of the city’s “Founding Fathers” which are found in the Miller High Life Theatre and the Baird Center.
VIEW THE MURALS
Painted in 1944, showing a transition, with the State Capitol as a backdrop, from Wisconsin farming with hand labor and horse-drawn plow to the use of motorized tractors and other modern farm machinery.
Depicting the wedding between Solomon Juneau and the daughter of a French-Indian trapper/trader and tribal chief, in 1820.
The mural features Solomon Juneau – Milwaukee’s first permanent white settler in 1818 – trading with area Indian tribes at the cabin he built east of the confluence of the Milwaukee and Menomonee Rivers, an area soon known as Juneautown.
Byron Kilbourn, depicting the founder of the West Side village then called Kilbourntown, Enoch Chase and E.S. Estes, who together founded an 1835 lakefront settlement in Bay View, and George H. Walker, the 1834 founder of Walker’s Point, now a South Side neighborhood.
Christopher Latham Sholes (1819 – 1890), the inventor of the typewriter, showing Sholes, inspired by a Muse, imagining an office full of women using his new invention.
Featuring the city’s foundries, tanneries, dairies and steel and paper mills.