The Martha Wendel Gallery

This is a collection of photos of the oil paintings created by Martha Lintner Wendel of Lancaster, Pennsylvania (b. 04/16/1894 d. 07/20/1970.)

She was the 8th great grand-daughter of Hans Herr, father of the first settler of Lancaster County, PA and my maternal grandmother. My name is David G. Kirchner a.k.a. Kirk (b. 10/11/1952.) They were painted between about 1959 and 1969, when she was 65 through 75 years old. Her goal was to give at least one painting to each of her children and grandchildren who were alive at the time. She did it! These paintings are now dispersed around the world, from California to Pennsylvania to Egypt among her children, their children, their children, and theirs.

 

If you are here because you are a branch, twig or leaf on Martha Lintner Wendel's family tree ... 

Martha Wendel traces her roots to Hans Herr, born about 1608 in Zurich, Switzerland. (See A Modest Mennonite Home for the whole story.) I maintain a family genealogy database numbering just a few thousand of the more than 13,000 descendants of Hans Herr who were recorded as of my mother's generation. I'll be very grateful for any information you can add or correct in my records.

​

Please take a few moments to locate yourself and your family on our family tree on this Web site.  If you have any additions or corrections, please E-mail them to me in any form or call me if you need help.
 

If you have a Martha Lintner Wendel painting that is not included in this gallery, please submit a photo. Here's how:

To take a photo of the Martha Wendel painting, lay the framed piece on a flat surface. If the frame has protruding eye hooks for a wire hanger, be sure to adjust the level with magazines or matchbooks or other objects so that the photo doesn’t have an odd perspective caused by the eye hooks. Shoot in natural daylight, without artificial hot spots caused by such things as spotlights. (Also be careful of shadows caused by the camera or photographer, since you will be shooting from directly overhead.)  Use the highest quality (pixel) setting on your digital camera. Use flash. Try to get the shot as perfectly straight-on (overhead) as possible. Don’t use zoom.  Frame the shot so that just a little bit of the picture frame is showing so I can tell exactly where to crop the photo.

  

Send the shot(s) to me as e-mail attachments in whatever format you can shoot.  PNG/JPG/GIF formats preferred. Provide any and all information written on the back of the canvas. Generally, Martha Wendel titled and dated each painting and in some cases she added notes such as “painted from a photograph and memory” or a sale price. Record that info exactly for each photo and also provide a description of the photo so I can match each photo to the proper title. E.g. “White fence in foreground with four cows and a barn in background.”​