Marcia Grunewald

Marcia Grunewald (1935–2000) was a distinguished Galena, Illinois artist and antiquarian celebrated for her rare mastery of Renaissance-style egg tempera painting. Shunning commercial mediums, Grunewald embraced a meticulous, hand-crafted process to document mid-20th-century Midwestern history. Her dedication to traditional craftsmanship required preparing every element by hand, emulsifying fresh egg yolks with distilled water and manually grinding raw, powdered pigments. She worked exclusively on rigid panels primed with traditional rabbitskin glue and gesso, which she hand-sanded to a porcelain smoothness. Because the translucent tempera dried almost instantly, she painstakingly built form, light, and depth using thousands of miniature, layered brushstrokes.
Her technical precision is beautifully preserved in her featured works. The Leavitt Estate Sale Painting (1965) is an evocative landscape capturing the stark, freezing atmosphere of a famous 39°F Memorial Day weekend estate sale just outside Galena. In contrast, her 1970s piece, "Moonglow Over Mud Lake," stands as an incredibly ambitious, monumental 48" x 32" panel depicting a frozen, otherworldly winter moonscape. In 1973, Grunewald channeled this deep reverence for history into a prominent Galena antique storefront. She and her husband operated the boutique alongside high-end regional shows for 27 years, cementing her legacy as a cornerstone of the local arts and history community.