1891-1984. Erik Haupt was born in Kassel, Germany but studied in this country at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, and it is with that city that he is most associated. Graduating from the Institute, he furthered his study at the Royal Academy in Munich, with the American expatriate artist, Carl von Marr, and then in Paris, at the Acadamie Julian with Jean Paul Laurens; at the Acadamie Colarossi with Richard E. Miller. Haupt was back in Baltimore in 1915, and by 1918 was teaching drawing at the Maryland Institute through 1925. By 1930 he was living on Gramercy Park, New York, a member of the National Arts Club there where he exhibited frequently, and where he enjoyed a one-artist show in 1972. Though Haupt painted figure works and garden scenes, he turned increasingly to the lucrative field of formal portraiture, where his work can be found in the Supreme Court and the Sons of the American Revolution in Washington, D. C.; the Chamber of Commerce, New York; Yale University; and Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The most significant influence on Haupt's early work would seem to be that of Richard Miller. Haupt may well have worked with Miller in Giverny, or more likely in St. Jean du Doigt on the coast of Brittany, where Miller began to spend his summers in 1912. The paintings that Haupt exhibited back in America beginning the following year may have been similar to The Jade Necklace. In 1915 he exhibited Early Morning and Afternoon in the Garden in the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; these same two works appeared in the 1916 annual at the National Academy of Design in New York; and in 1916, he exhibited Early Morning again, along with Daydreaming and The Picnic in the Corcoran Gallery Biennial in Washington, D. C. These titles all suggest the Impressionist subjects and aesthetics of Miller, Frederick Frieseke, and their colleagues that were favored in Giverny, France, beginning in the late 1900s.