Louis Charles Christopher Krieger

Louis Charles Christopher Krieger (Baltimore, 1873 - 1940) was an American mycologist and botanical watercolourist, regarded as the finest painter of fungi in North America. His work, carried out with scientific precision, supported mycological research and helped document the fungi of his country.

Born in Baltimore, he received his first schooling in Lutheran schools and, as a teenager, enrolled at the Maryland Institute's School of Art and Design. At eighteen he became an artistic assistant in the Microscopy Division of the Department of Agriculture, painting fungi from the District of Columbia. After a year of study in Munich, he taught drawing and painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Design. From 1902 he illustrated for William Gilson Farlow at Harvard University, producing more than 350 fungus images, and later painted over 300 more for the gynaecologist Howard A. Kelly. He also worked in Chico (California), Cuba and the New York State Museum, where he prepared a guide to the higher fungi published in 1935.

Krieger described several species and varieties of agaric fungi and published papers in Mycologia and other journals, among them an article illustrated with sixteen colour plates in National Geographic in 1920. The abbreviation "L.Krieg." identifies him as the authority for these organisms' classification.

His legacy survives in his plates, many held in scientific collections, and in the mycological library that bears his name at the University of Michigan.