Born to German parents in Midway, Ohio, Theodore Wendel studied art at the McMicken School of Design before traveling to Munich, where he enrolled at the Royal Academy in 1876. There he joined a circle of artists around Frank Duveneck, painting and traveling through Italy during the summers and spending winters at Duveneck’s school of art in Munich until his return to the United States in 1882. By 1886 Wendel was back in Europe, this time in France, at Giverny, where he met Claude Monet. Wendel soon abandoned the dark realism of his Munich years and embraced the lighter palette and more atmospheric painting of the Impressionists.