His son, Alfred H. Maurer, was born in 1868, and his trip to Europe was the highlight of his life. He gravitate toward, Paris, the epicenter of art in the whole world at the time, and the best place to make a reputation for ones self in the first decade of the brand new twentieth century. He loved it. Paris was an exciting, exotic, thrilling, amusement park of a city, brimming over with art, music, literature, drama, the opera (which combined all the above), and most of all the avant-garde. He like it so much he stayed past the one year his father had promised to support him. He stayed over TEN years in fact. He became a regular a the salons of Leo and Gertrude Stein and there met the BRILLIANT Henri Matisse. Matisse had a profound effect upon him. Almost overnight he jettisoned everything he'd learned from his father and the conservative National Academy, departing totally from realism in favor of Matisse's brand of freedom in terms of color and design.

Maurer's Woman with Blue Background, painting in 1907, near the end of his Paris sojourn, is Matisse with an American accent, very reminiscent of Matisse's Woman with Green Stripe painted in 1905. Having departed so completely from the image his father had of him as an artist, it's little wonder he stayed in Paris ten years. Perhaps he was afraid to go home. When he DID, return to New York in 1909, his work found a place in the 291 gallery of Alfred Stieglitz along side the work of John Marin whose paintings were very similar to his. Together, some four years before the Armory Show of 1913 officially brought modern art to this country, they were among the first to introduce it to the elite gallery patrons of the New York art scene. One can only imagine the encounter between the Maurer and his father when the old man saw what ten years of study in Paris had wrought.