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An American Vision

An American Vision III

Godel & Co., Inc., Fine Art 39a East 72nd Street, New York, NY 10021 (212) 288-7272 | www.godelfineart.com

An American Vision III Copyright 2010 Godel & Co., Inc., New York Written by Thomas Quick Edited by Katherine Baumgartner Photographed by Allan Tarantino Designed by Christopher Kuntze Printed by Capital Offset, Concord, New Hampshire Library of Congress Control Number: 2010935068 front c over : Frank W. Benson, Down the Rapids, c. 1923 back c over : Max Weyl, Hollyhocks, c. 1881

Foreword

Since the late 1970s, public interest in American art has grown substantially, creating a boom in scholarship, museum expansions, and, of course, prices. In fact, many artists’ prices have grown faster than hedge funds, high-end real estate, and the S&P 500. We still believe in the art we sell, and we study and collect it passionately. My wife Melinda and I visited museums all over Europe this year, but we have not forgotten the treasures that can be found in our home state of New York. As I write this, we are about to embark on a trip that will take us to visit the outstanding collections of American art held by the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, and the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg. Life is an adventure, and we will continue to travel far and wide to seek out the finest American art. Our enthusiasm prevails, and we ask you, too, to “keep the faith.” Howard J. Godel President, Godel & Co., Inc.

Acknowledgments

Our gratitude goes first and foremost to the private collectors who have allowed us to reproduce their paintings and watercolors in this latest installment of our American Vision series of catalogues. I think that they will be thoroughly satisfied with the excellent photographs by Allan Tarantino, informative entries by Thomas Quick, and elegant design by Christopher Kuntze. Katherine Baumgartner edited the catalogue and our interns Avery Kaye and Madeline Love assisted in researching the works. Our staff strives to provide our clients with the highest level of service on a daily basis. Katherine Baumgartner, Ellery Kurtz, and Noelle DeSantis bring wisdom, taste, and discretion to every interaction. Thanks to Noelle’s management of our inventory and Lynn Tramondo’s bookkeeping, we run a very tight ship. Upstairs at Fine Art Frames, Edward Holland and Nino DeLeon have presided over the expansion of our framing business despite the recession. We continue to offer a wide selection of high-quality period and reproduction frames, knowledgeable service, and fair prices. Finally, I would like to thank the private collectors, curators, and advisers who make up our distinguished clientele. In addition to offering you the finest paintings, we are also committed to assisting you with research and appraisals; conservation, framing, and lighting; and storage and shipping. Thank you for allowing us to do what we love. Howard J. Godel

Severin Roesen (c. 1815–c. 1872) | Floral Still Life

At the time of the European revolutions of 1848, Severin Roesen left Germany for New York City, bringing with him the style of still-life painting developed in Düsseldorf. He found a ready audience for his exuberant arrangements of fruit and flowers in his adopted country, and he attracted a number of students and followers as well. It was probably the Panic of 1857 that uprooted Roesen again, for it was around this time that he began to tour a number of Pennsylvania towns in search of commissions, finally settling in the lumbering center of Williamsport around 1860. Characteristic of Roesen’s Williamsport period, Floral Still Life presents a large, densely arranged bouquet that bristles with roses, tulips, lilacs, lilies, primroses, and morning glories. Some flowers that have fallen out of the bulging bouquet or were unable to fit inside it lie below the arrangement on a black marble tabletop, as does a bird’s nest with three blue eggs—one of Roesen’s signature motifs. Roesen carefully arranged this profusion of detail to dazzle the viewer by creating multiple layers of blooms, cleverly alternating light and dark elements, and by including linear activity along the edges of the bouquet. The flowers appear especially animated in this example of Roesen’s work, and they convey a convincing sense of volume and depth. When a descendant of early Pennsylvanian settlers, James Alexander III, probably acquired Floral Still Life in the 1860s or early 1870s, the United States was enjoying a period of unprecedented prosperity. With its abundance of cultivated specimens, Roesen’s painting would have symbolized the fruition of the desires that motivated his ancestors to immigrate to the American wilderness in 1736. The painting descended in the Alexander family until the present day.

Oil on canvas, 30 × 25¼ inches Provenance: James Alexander III, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, until 1886; by descent to his son, James Porterfield Alexander, St. Clair County, Illinois, until 1908; by descent to his daughter, Celia Halsey Alexander Johnson, Belleville, Illinois, until 1971; by descent to her daughter, Annabelle Alexander Johnson Couch, Shiloh, Illinois, until 1995; by descent to her son, James Alexander Couch, Deer Park, Illinois, until 2009 Note: A letter from Roesen scholar Judith Hansen O’Toole accompanies this painting.

George W. Platt (1839–1899) | Watermelon on a Tabletop

Watermelon on a Tabletop presents a watermelon split into three large pieces, which are displayed on a broad, unadorned wooden tabletop. Seeds can be seen falling from the nearest piece onto the table, where a small chunk of watermelon flesh rests in a puddle of juice that drips over the table’s edge. The knife that has been used to cut open the watermelon also extends over the tabletop toward the viewer, serving as a reminder of human presence in the immediate past. Natural light streaming in from an unseen window or door to the left illuminates the objects. Platt’s skillful integration of large masses and irregular outlines, and his interest in watermelon flesh, recall still lifes painted by Raphaelle and James Peale in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century, while his use of a plain tabletop and a roughly split watermelon evoke the more democratic, country aesthetic sometimes adopted by John F. Francis and George Hetzel in Pennsylvania during the 1850s and 1860s. The trompe l’oeil knife and droplet of juice on the edge of the tabletop also indicate Platt’s participation in the revival of trompe l’oeil painting in Philadelphia during the mid-1870s, which was led by William M. Harnett and John F. Peto, his fellow students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Trompe l’oeil painting would come to dominate Platt’s work in the 1890s. Finally, Platt’s broad brushwork may be a legacy of his study in Munich, where American students like Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase pioneered a brushy, expressionistic style. While this technique is often considered to be incompatible with trompe l’oeil painting, Watermelon on a Tabletop shows Platt in command of spatial and textural effects, much like Peto, who also favored a looser technique.

Oil on canvas, 22¼ × 27 inches Signed lower left: G. W. Platt Provenance: private collection, St. Louis, Missouri, until 2009

George Henry Hall (1825–1913) | Flowers in Miniature, 1862

George Henry Hall was the most popular American still-life painter of the 1860s. When he auctioned off some of his work in 1865, in order to raise money for a trip to Spain, 75 paintings brought a total of around $12,0001—a staggering amount for still lifes, which academic tradition considered the least elevated form of art. The key to Hall’s success may be the unusual intimacy which his still lifes offer to the viewer. This quality is especially present in the informal, closelycropped compositions of his smaller works, such as Flowers in Miniature, in which a handful of violets, sweet peas, and forget-me-nots has been casually stuffed into a champagne flute. Encountered in a dark, anonymous space with hardly any depth, they seem an utterly private and personal communication between the artist and the viewer—perhaps using the popular mid-century “language of flowers,” in which each species of flowers corresponded to a different emotion. Hall painted Flowers in Miniature for Sophia B. Goodrich, with whom he had a mysterious relationship. The bachelor and maid lived and traveled together, perhaps continuously, from at least 1870 until her death in 1909, and at his death four years later, Hall’s outdated 1900 will left most of his small fortune to Goodrich. The second beneficiary, the artist Jennie Brownscombe, explained to the newspapers: Miss Goodrich, who was 79 years old when she died, was Mr. Hall’s mother’s dearest friend…She cared for his adopted daughter Georgie until her death, more than 20 years ago. Mr. Hall never forgot her love for his adopted daughter, and that is why he made Miss Goodrich his beneficiary and directed that she be buried in the Hall family plot in Greenwood cemetery.2

While this explanation fits the facts, it could also be a polite fiction that masked the romantic character of Hall and Goodrich’s relationship.3 They are indeed buried together, like a husband and wife, at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 1. H enry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 482. 2. “Man Leaves Fortune to Two Women,” Evening News (San Jose, California), May 12, 1913, 7. 3. Th is conjecture is complicated by one report that Hall married an Italian woman in the 1870s. See Stebbins, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and The Italian Experience 1760–1914, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), 206.

Oil on board, 5 × 4 inches Signed lower right: Geo. Hall Inscribed on verso in the artist’s hand: Painted for / Sophia B. Goodrich / May 29, 1862 Inscribed on verso: Given to me by / Miss Brownscombe / April 23 1919 Old label on verso: Flowers in Miniature / George H. Hall, artist / Miss S. B. Goodrich / proprietor / 10 Third Street Provenance: the artist to Sophia B. Goodrich, 1862; Jennie Brownscombe, c. 1913–1919; private collection, Boston, until 2010 Exhibited: National Academy of D esign, 1866, no. 326.

Max Weyl (1837–1914) | Hollyhocks, c. 1881

As American taste shifted in the late 1870s, artists and critics rediscovered the still lifes of John La Farge. After finding little audience for his sophisticated blend of Pre-Raphaelitism, realism, and Japonisme in the 1860s, La Farge now influenced a new generation of still-life painters like Maria Oakey Dewing and J. Alden Weir. The landscape painter Max Weyl, whose earlier forays into stilllife painting were modeled after the traditional compositions of the Düsseldorf school and George Henry Hall, also embraced the style in the early 1880s with striking results. In works such as Hollyhocks, Weyl abandoned the conventional tabletop, and any support whatsoever, in favor of a floating arrangement of five stems of maroon and lavender specimens in a flat pattern against a shallow, cream-colored background. Far from a slavish imitator of La Farge’s similar floral works,1 Weyl made bold formal choices that create an exciting visual experience. His closely cropped composition monumentalizes the flowers. The contrast between the light background and the darker stems animates them, by focusing the viewer’s attention on their gently bending linear movement, and the partially backlit effect emphasizes the volume of the blooms and buds. Together with Weyl’s broad brushwork, these effects fashion an admirably bold, dynamic image from the simplest of elements. Hollyhocks relates closely to another painting of the same name and format from 1881 (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.). The comparison between the blond tonality of our painting and the dark green tonality of the Smithsonian painting indicates that Weyl was approaching still life as a vehicle for beautiful formal and tonal relationships, in accordance with the Aesthetic Movement and James McNeill Whistler’s art-for-art’s-sake credo. 1. L a Farge painted hollyhocks at least four times in oil and encaustic during the 1860s, and several more times in watercolor in the late 1870s and 1880s. The Smithsonian Hollyhocks is particularly close in its palette to La Farge’s Red Hollyhocks, c. 1863 (private collection). While our Hollyhocks lacks such a close precedent, La Farge’s Hollyhocks and Corn, c. 1865 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), does contain a similar backlit effect, and he regularly used light backgrounds at a time when few other still-life painters did.

Oil on canvas, 21¼ × 15 inches Signed lower right: Max Weyl / 8… Label on verso: Buckingham Art Shop, Washington, D.C. Related work: Hollyhocks, 1881, oil on canvas, 25½ × 16½ inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.).

Jerome Thompson (1814–1886) | The Rustic Chat, 1850

Jerome Thompson’s father reportedly would knock over the easel if he found his son painting, so Thompson taught himself to paint in secret. Hardly an iconoclast, Thompson’s father was a portrait painter himself, but he needed Jerome on the family farm, since his eldest son, Cephas Giovanni, was already studying art. Undeterred, Thompson left home at the age of seventeen to pursue an artistic career, and he persevered until he became quite successful in the 1860s. A turning point for Thompson came in 1850. Having painted portraits since the early 1830s, sometimes traveling in order to seek out commissions, he now exhibited two genre scenes, The Rustic Chat and Children at a Brook (unlocated), at the American Art-Union, and two more, The Pick Nick and The Artist’s Studio (both unlocated), at the National Academy of Design. With at least three of the four sold by the end of the year, Thompson specialized in genre painting from this point forward. In The Rustic Chat, a young man speaks pleasantly with a young woman in front of a barn. He has come a fair distance, judging from the panting dog at his feet, and has removed the saddle and bridle from his horse, since he intends to stay a while. The lady has gathered hay in her skirt, which she feeds to the horse as she strokes his head. Chickens peck and strut nearby, and barn swallows fly to and from their roost above. The painting can be seen as a twist on William Sidney Mount’s well-known conversation piece Bargaining for a Horse, 1835 (New–York Historical Society), in which two farmers stand outside of a barn negotiating the sale of the horse that stands behind them. For Thompson’s young woman and her suitor, the horse that he rides and she feeds represents the household to which both would contribute in a future marriage—on which they appear close to making a deal.

Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 inches Signed and dated lower left: Jerome Thompson 1850 Provenance: Kirby, Carrington & Co., New York, 1850; private collection, Connecticut; Alexander Gallery, New York, 1980; Berry-Hill Galleries, New York; a corporate collection, until 2010 Exhibited: American Art-Union, New York, 1850, no. 242. Literature: Lee M. Edwards, “Early Jerome Thompson Genre Painting,” in “New Discoveries in American Art,” American Art Journal 14, no. 2 (Spring 1982), 72–73 (illustrated); Edwards, “The Life and Career of Jerome Thompson,” American Art Journal 14, no. 4 (Autumn 1982), 8 (illustrated), 12; John Caldwell and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 582–83; Teresa A. Carbone et al., American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum, vol. 2 (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2006), 1001.

John Carlin (1813–1891) | Sunday Afternoon, 1859

In John Carlin’s Sunday Afternoon, an elderly couple spends the day indoors while a young man courts their daughter on the porch outside. Their rural home, with a Dutch door and open rafters, is simply appointed with country furniture, earthenware vessels, and a woven basket. The older woman reads the family Bible, a traditional occupation on Sunday afternoons, and her husband, having hung up his hat for the day of rest, smokes a pipe as he looks out at a mountain lake. Carlin may have playfully characterized the couple by placing the sleeping dog at the woman’s feet and the cat, which coolly surveys the scene from the seat of a chair, near her husband. The composition reflects the different stages of life of the two couples, with the older, more sedentary generation inside and the younger, more active one glimpsed through the open window. The clock that hangs on the wall dividing old and young may represent the time that separates them. Perhaps the man gazing outside from the position of old age is reminded of his own youthful courtship. Carlin seems to have been experimenting at this time with the temporal meanings that windows could yield. He reversed the dynamic of Sunday Afternoon in The Connoisseur, 1860 (Christie’s, New York, November 30, 1994, lot 12), in which an elderly scholar intent upon a manuscript is seen through an oldfashioned casement window with leaded glass. Rather than looking from the inside out, from the past to the present, as in Sunday Afternoon, here the viewer looks from the street into the scholar’s study, from the present into the past.

Oil on canvas, 14 × 12 inches Signed and dated lower right: J. Carlin 1859 Inscribed on verso: Sunday Afternoon / by J. Carlin / 1859 Provenance: the estate of James Vandergrift, Kansas City, Missouri, until 2010 Exhibited: National Academy of Design, New York, 1860, no. 370. Related works: The Suitor, 1875, watercolor on paper, 9½ × 12½ inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); The Lover’s Ordeal, oil on canvas, 12 × 16 inches (Doyle, New York, April 5, 1989).

George Cochran Lambdin (1830–1896) | Goldfish, 1859

Although George Cochran Lambdin is best known today for the floral still lifes he painted beginning in the 1870s, he made his reputation with sensitive genre paintings in the 1850s and 1860s. Young women in love or distress were his preferred subjects until around 1860, when he began painting small children and young girls as well. Along with J. G. Brown and Seymour Guy, who started to exhibit their paintings of children at this time, Lambdin disseminated a new conception of childhood that emphasized innocence and play rather than preparation for adulthood. In Goldfish, a blond girl of five or six dreamily rests her head on her hands as the movement of two goldfish in a glass bowl mesmerizes her.1 She has left off playing with the dolls and toy animals that lie neglected on the floor, trading imagination for observation in what would seem to be a reflective moment of greater maturity. She is still quite unaware, however, of the propriety that the parlor in which she sits would require. Lambdin invites the viewer to become similarly transfixed by the elegant, if old-fashioned, American Rococo interior, especially the warm color harmonies created by the girl’s yellow dress and rosy flesh tones, and the red drapes, flowers, and carpet. Lambdin exhibited two paintings entitled Gold Fishes in Troy, New York, in the early 1860s. One was owned by the landscape painter John Frederick Kensett and was sold at his estate sale in 1873 to a Mr. Livermore.2 John Lamson Flagg, who served as the mayor of Troy and a state assemblyman, owned the other, which presumably descended in the family following his death in 1874. Our painting is probably one of the two. 1. Th e young girl may be Agnes Mary Lambdin, the artist’s youngest sister, who would have been about six years old when Goldfish was painted. 2. Th e dimensions listed in the catalogue, 11 × 14, are slightly larger than our painting. See Robert Somerville, The Collection of over Five Hundred Paintings and Studies by the Late John F. Kensett, (New York: Association Hall, 1873), no. 445.

Oil on canvas, 12¼ × 9 inches Signed and dated lower left: Geo C. Lambdin. / 59 Provenance: Schwarz Gallery, Philadelphia, c. 2002; private collection, Massa chuestts, until 2010 Exhibited: (probably) Young Men’s Association, Troy, New York, 1860, no. 3 (as Gold Fishes), or 1862, no. 45 (as Gold Fishes). Literature: The Lambdins of Philadelphia: Newly Discovered Works (Philadelphia: Schwarz Gallery, 2002), 22, pl. 17. Note: This painting retains its original frame.

Seymour Guy (1824–1910) | One for Mamma, One for You, and One for Me, 1881

As an apprentice to the portrait painter Ambrosini Jerome in England, Seymour Guy learned the fine points of painting technique. His sumptuous flesh tones were rarely equaled by American artists, so it is little wonder that when his good friend J. G. Brown started painting rosy-cheeked children around 1859, Guy seized on the subject and specialized in wonderfully illusionistic depictions of children for the rest of his life. Monumental and painstakingly realized, One for Mamma, One for You, and One for Me was Guy’s single submission to the 1881 exhibition of the National Academy of Design. The painting depicts a girl indicating to her younger sister the roasted apples intended for them and their mother. The apples hang by strings from forks that have been stuck into the top of the narrow fireplace, which may be in the pantry or another smaller room of the house. Behind the pierced grate that surrounds the hearth, a black cat with a white mouth and chest looks out toward the viewer. With her arm around her younger sister in a gesture that suggests both encouragement and restraint, the older girl teaches the virtues of patience and sharing to the appetitive youngster. Her lace collar and stockings befit her greater maturity, while her younger sister’s slightly torn sleeve and bare legs and feet suggest her impulsiveness and lack of self-consciousness. With her lips parted in expectation, the younger girl clutches a spoon and a plate of blueand-white porcelain, ready to eat all three apples. Guy may have found his title in a popular English children’s book, The Hope of the Katzekopfs (1844). The phrase “one for Mamma; one for you; and one for me” occurs in the story at the point when two sisters discuss cutting some roses from a rosebush in their garden.1 1. W illiam Churne of Staffordshire (Rev. Francis Edward Paget), The Hope of the Katzekopfs; or, the Sorrows of Selfishness: A Fairy Tale, 2nd ed. (London: Joseph Masters, 1846), 128-35.

Oil on canvas, 37 × 31 inches Signed and dated lower right: SJGuy N. A. 1881 Original plaque inscribed: One for Mamma / One for You One for Me / S. J. Guy Provenance: sale, American Art Galleries, New York, November 1–2, 1882, lot 125; the Masco Corporation, Taylor, Michigan, 1995–98; sale, Sotheby’s, New York, December 3, 1998, lot 111; private collection, New York Exhibited: National Academy of Design, Fifty-Sixth Annual Exhibition, 1881, no. 177. Literature: “Fine Arts. The Tenth Street Studio Reception,” New York Herald, February 26, 1881, 8; “The Academy Paintings,” New York Times, March 28, 1881, 5; “Fine Arts. Art and Artists in New York,” The Independent 33, no. 1696 (June 2, 1881), 7; S. R. Koehler, ed., The United States Art Directory and YearBook 2 (New York, London, and Paris: Cassell & Company, 1884), 11. Note: This painting retains its original frame and plaque.

Thomas Doughty (1793–1856) | Approaching Storm, 1822

In the early 1820s Thomas Doughty, the first native Anglo-American artist to specialize in landscape painting, quickly rose to prominence in Philadelphia art circles. The leading collector of the time, Robert Gilmor, Jr., of Baltimore, was an early patron, and the writer John Neal considered Doughty to be one of the best landscape painters of the day. An exceptionally dramatic painting from Doughty’s early career, Approaching Storm depicts a shepherd following his flock down a windy mountain as dark clouds billow overhead. Trees bend in the gale, wildflowers flutter, and a tall tree has blown over, falling across a stream below it. Its roots have been ripped from the earth, and they are displayed against the background to suggest the violence of the storm. Along with In Full Cry, 1820 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and two versions of View of Baltimore from Beech Hill, the Seat of Robert Gilmor, 1822 (Baltimore Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Approaching Storm is one of Doughty’s earliest known paintings. In its modeling of forms, palette, and stormy mood, it is also similar to Landscape with Curving River, c. 1823 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). With its strong contrasts, fallen tree, and threatening sky, Approaching Storm is perhaps closest in Doughty’s oeuvre to the wilderness views that Thomas Cole would begin to paint in 1825. Cole studied Doughty’s work when he was beginning his artistic career in Philadelphia from 1823 to 1825, and he could easily have seen our painting at Doughty’s studio during this time. Whether or not this occurred, the painting’s stylistic anticipation of foundational works of the Hudson River School vividly demonstrates Doughty’s important role in the development of American landscape painting.

Oil on canvas, 23 × 31 inches Signed and dated lower right: T. Doughty / 1822 Provenance: private collection, Ohio, until 2009 Exhibited: (probably) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1823, no. 339, and/or 1825, no. 28, and/ or 1826, no. 399 (as Landscape, a Land Storm and Land Storm, trees falling across a stream); (possibly) National Academy of Design, New York, 1845, no. 71 (as Land Storm). Literature: (possibly) New York Herald, April 24, 1845, 2.

Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860) | Falls of Niagara, Viewed from the American Side, 1831

Rembrandt Peale, the son of the painter Charles Willson Peale, was primarily a portraitist best known for his likenesses of George Washington. Yet he was also familiar with the budding American landscape tradition, and had seen the many paintings and prints made of Niagara Falls, that most American of sights. It may have been an 1830 meeting with Thomas Cole, who had visited the Falls the year before and was producing a painting, a print, and poetry on the subject, that convinced Peale to see the Falls for himself in October of 1831. Like printmakers who had recently treated the Falls, Peale produced multiple views of the same sight—from different points of view and at different times of day—to bring out the picturesque variety of the Falls and to convey their magnitude. He painted at least five views of the Falls, first in watercolor on the spot, and then in oil in the studio. Three of these oils are known today, including Falls of Niagara, Viewed from the American Side. The painting presents a close-up view from the base of the American Falls, with the Horseshoe Falls in the distance. In order to evoke the awesome scale, power, and roar of the Falls, Peale employed many of the devices he had encountered while copying the wild, moody landscapes of Salvator Rosa in Europe the year before. A tiny figure in the foreground strains to reach the security of a frail, almost leafless tree silhouetted against the mist, which seems to bend sympathetically in the wind. In addition, a dark thundercloud appears in an otherwise bright sky to empty its contents on the already moist scene. The towering Falls cascade from the very top of the composition, where light from the sky makes them translucent, down to the murky depths below the bottom of the image. Among Peale’s several views, this one powerfully demonstrates the sublime aspects of the Falls.

Oil on canvas, 18¼ × 24⅛ inches Provenance: the artist’s estate; sale, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, November 18, 1862, no. 50; Allen Gerdau; gifted to Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Connecticut, 1956; Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, c. 1980; Christie’s, New York, May 29, 1987, lot 12; Mr. and Mrs. Charles O. Smith, Jr., Moultrie, Georgia, c. 1992–95; Mrs. Deen Day Smith, Atlanta, Georgia, c. 1995–2009; private collection Exhibited: Detroit Institute of Arts (and traveling), The Peale Family: Three Generations of American Artists, January-May 1967, no. 168 (illustrated in catalogue, 115); Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Connecticut (and traveling), 250 Years of American Art from Three Connecticut Museums, 1700–1950, January-April 1969, no. 16; Philadelphia Museum of Art (and traveling), The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy 1770–1870, November 1996-July 1997, no. 108 (catalogue 83, 86, 307, pl. 50). Literature: John A. Mahey, “The Studio of Rembrandt Peale,” American Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1969), 30; Jeremy Elwell Adamson, Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697–1901, exh. cat. (Washington, D. C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 46; Carol Eaton Hevner, Rembrandt Peale 1778–1860: A Life in the Arts, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1985), 105n4; Lillian B. Miller, In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778–1860, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 211, 213–14, 302, fig. 97. Related works: Niagara Falls from the Canadian Side, Table Rock, 1831, oil on canvas, 18¼ × 24¼ inches (with Godel & Co.); General View of Niagara Falls, 1831, oil on linen, 18¼ × 24 inches (Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida); Falls of Niagara from Goat Island, 1832, oil on canvas, 18 × 24 inches (formerly collection of Lee B. Anderson, New York).

Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860) | Niagara Falls from the Canadian Side, Table Rock, 1831

As Niagara Falls became a requisite subject for print series devoted to the American landscape, the number of visitors to the Falls increased rapidly. Improved transportation, especially with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, was another factor. The joint rise of tourism and printmaking, in turn, affected the production of views, since more experienced, sophisticated viewers required novelty and variety. Rembrandt Peale’s response was to create at least five different views to suit a range of tastes and moods. While awe at the sublime grandeur of the Falls was a common initial reaction for artists and visitors alike, a more placid mood developed toward the mid-nineteenth century, as the Falls became a common destination and acquired the atmosphere of a resort. Pictorially, this translated into quiet, picturesque compositions like Niagara Falls from the Canadian Side, Table Rock, which presents the wide expanse of water at the base of the Horseshoe Falls’ wide arc. Table Rock appears at the end of the Falls on the right, and the American side can be glimpsed at the left. A single figure lounges peacefully on a flat rock at the edge of the water, gazing out at the warm light that suffuses the cloud of mist at the base of the Falls and the hazy sky above. The great cataract seems to fall silent as the viewer focuses on the fine atmosphere.

Oil on canvas, 18¼ × 24¼ inches Inscribed on verso: Niagara Falls / viewed from the Canada side / showing the Platform called Table Rock. / by Rembrandt Peale. Provenance: the artist’s estate; sale, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Valuable Original Oil Paintings by the Late Rembrandt Peale, November 18, 1862; by descent in a family to a private collection, Connecticut; John H. Surovek Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida, c. 1981; Neil Andrews; John H. Surovek Gallery, 2006; private collection Literature: Jeremy Elwell Adamson, “Frederic Edwin Church’s ‘Niagara’: The Sublime as Transcendence” (Ph. D. diss., University of Michigan, 1981), 151–52, ill. 131; Lillian B. Miller, In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778–1860, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in association with the University of Washington Press, 1992), 211–14, 302, fig. 95, pl. 27; Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy 1770–1870, exh. cat. (New York: Abbeville Press in association with The Trust for Museum Exhibitions and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 83–86, pl. 51. Related works: Falls of Niagara, Viewed from the American Side, 1831, oil on canvas, 18¼ × 24⅛ inches (with Godel & Co.); General View of Niagara Falls, 1831, oil on linen, 18¼ × 24 inches (Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida); Falls of Niagara from Goat Island, 1832, oil on canvas, 18 × 24 inches (formerly collection of Lee B. Anderson, New York).

George Harvey (1799–1880) | Scene of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, c. 1837 For Thomas Jefferson, the view from Harpers Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in Virginia,1 offered “perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.”2 Originally a gateway to the West, the town began to industrialize when George Washington established a national armory there, which was later famously raided by John Brown. Harpers Ferry continued to develop with the arrival in 1833 of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which followed the Potomac from Washington, D.C. The canal’s competitor, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, reached the town the following year and connected to points south in 1836 by constructing a bridge over the Potomac to meet the Winchester & Potomac Railroad. George Harvey came to Harpers Ferry in the mid-to-late 1830s, probably by means of the new canal or railroad. While artists like Joshua Shaw and Thomas Doughty had previously depicted Harpers Ferry as a Jeffersonian natural wonder, Harvey was the first to capture its new incarnation as a modern transportation hub. Scene of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia depicts the crowded view from the northern bank of the Potomac up to rocky Maryland Heights. Family and friends bid farewell to a train full of passengers from a canal boat below, since the train’s perch between the bluff and the canal is so narrow. In the foreground, a horseman on the towpath appears to be readying a team to pull a passenger boat along the canal. The bridge on the left leads into the town of Harpers Ferry. Harvey’s watercolor and oil paintings of this period demonstrate a pronounced interest in the theme of transportation. View on the Hudson, 1836 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Afternoon: Hastings Landing, Palisade Rocks in Shadow, New York, 1836–37 (New–York Historical Society), and Pittsford on the Erie Canal—A Sultry Calm, 1837 (Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester), feature canal boats, steamboats, rafts, and river schooners. 1. H arpers Ferry is now in West Virginia, which seceded from the Confederate state of Virginia to join the Union in 1862. 2. Th omas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 2nd ed. (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853), 17.

Oil on panel, 18¼ × 24 inches Signed lower right: G. Harvey Provenance: by descent in the family to Dr. Paul Seabury, Berkeley, California; with Serendipity Books, Berkeley; William Reese Company, New Haven, Connecticut, 1993; with James Cummins Bookseller, New York, 1997; private collection, Palm Beach, Florida Exhibited: Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, The Virginia Landscape, July-November 2000 (catalogue, 57, fig. 3.8). Literature: John A. Cuthbert, Early Art and Artists in West Virginia: An Introduction and Biographical Directory (Morgantown, West Virginia: West Virginia University Press, 2000), 58–59, 185–186, pl. 47.

John William Hill (1812–1879) | Scene Along the Hudson, 1865

Profoundly influenced by reading John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–46) around 1855, John William Hill heeded the English critic’s advice to represent nature as faithfully as possible. In 1863 he became one of the eight founders of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, an organization that sought to reform American art along the lines of Ruskin’s aesthetic philosophy and the paintings of the English Pre-Raphaelites. While their English counterparts tended to paint medieval figural subjects, however, Hill and his fellow American Pre-Raphaelites focused on landscape and still life. They also distinguished themselves through their preference for watercolor, Ruskin’s favorite medium, laying the groundwork for the American watercolor revival of the late nineteenth century. Hill, who had specialized in watercolor since the 1830s, came to be regarded as the best American Pre-Raphaelite working in the medium. Following Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing (1857), he abandoned the flat washes and linear modeling he had previously used in favor of a combination of stippling and hatching. Although working like a miniaturist, Hill created large, breathtakingly elaborated landscapes such as Scene Along the Hudson. This remarkable watercolor pairs qualities that are usually mutually exclusive: careful overall attention to light and atmosphere and an insistence upon transcribing things exactly as they are seen, practically down to the last blade of grass. Hill included tiny signs of human presence like the figures and pastured cows in the foreground, the sails of schooners on the distant river, and a miniscule train in the middle ground, barely perceptible to the naked eye. Since Hill lived in West Nyack, New York, he painted the Hudson frequently, although seldom with such luminous results as in Scene Along the Hudson. The Palisades, c. 1870 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and the similar View of the Hudson River from the Palisades, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1873 (New–York Historical Society), also include figures on a hillside sloping down to the river.

Watercolor on paper, 14 × 20 inches Signed and dated lower right: J. W. Hill / 1865. Provenance: private collection, Bellingham, Washington, until 2010

Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910) | October on the Hudson near West Point

October on the Hudson near West Point likely depicts the view from a point north of Cold Spring, New York, looking south along the Hudson River toward West Point. Whittredge faithfully rendered the steep hillsides and undulating shoreline of the Hudson Highlands that lead south to the site of the military academy, where trails of smoke rise. On this hazy afternoon, the distant mountain ridges are reduced to delicately cascading lines, and a faint glow emanates from the painting as the sun descends behind the clouds. From this high vantage point, the distant town and the boats navigating the river seem insignificant amidst the great expanse of space that opens up before the viewer, and beneath the sweep of the creamy blue sky. A stand of trees, each with its own character, encloses the foreground, separating it from the topographical view beyond. On the right, a woman rides sidesaddle down a path; past a stone fence to the left, boulders break through the soil of an untilled field. The swiftness and summary character of Whittredge’s brushwork in this section suggest that he painted our picture en plein air, as he began to do regularly in the 1870s. October on the Hudson near West Point is similar in subject, handling, and palette to Autumn on the Hudson, c. 1875, formerly in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, December 3, 2002, lot 19).

Oil on canvas, 12 × 20 inches Signed lower left: W. Whittredge Inscribed on stretcher: …Whittredge N. A. / October on the Hudson Provenance: purchased from the artist by Mr. Sanderson; his daughter, Emily Sanderson (Mrs. Colin Carter); Vose Galleries, Boston, c. 1945; Dr. Carlton Palmer, Long Island, New York; private collection, San Angelo, Texas; the estate of Mary Ellen Banyard Exhibited: Vose Galleries, Boston, Summer Exhibition, 1945, no. 5. Related work: Autumn on the Hudson, 1875, oil on canvas, 19¾ × 26¾ inches (Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, December 3, 2002, lot 19).

William Louis Sonntag (1822–1900) | Twilight Landscape, 1855

By the early 1850s, William Louis Sonntag loomed large in the Cincinnati art world where he had begun his career. His activities were regularly covered in the local newspapers and journals, and local collectors acquired his colorful wilderness landscapes with such alacrity that one writer considered buying them to be a fad.1 As a critic recounted in 1858, after Sonntag had settled in New York, it was time for the artist to seek broader horizons: In 1853, having amassed a considerable sum as the rewards of his incessant toil and study, and having about $5,000 in commissions to execute, he was persuaded to visit Europe for further study, and to obtain fine opportunities to fill his engagements. He went abroad, passing in a kind of flying visit of inspection over Europe, returning home after the brief absence of eight months; resolved to finish up his promised work and then again to repair to Italy, which he did in 1855.2

Sonntag painted Twilight Landscape while briefly back in Cincinnati in the middle of this exciting period in his career. Perhaps under the influence of the Old Master landscapes he saw while touring Europe, the artist achieved a stately synthesis of American tree, rock, and mountain forms that had often eluded him earlier on. Amidst a shoreline lush with firmly modeled foliage, the viewer’s eye alights on a log cabin sending up a trail of blue smoke; two of the cabin’s inhabitants fish from the shore on the left. Broken slabs of flat rock jut up in the central foreground, echoing the form of the promontory that towers behind the cabin in the middle ground. The last rays of the setting sun divide the background into rosy areas of mountains and clouds and a finely gradated expanse of hazy blue sky. In an oeuvre marked by a nervous sensibility, this self-assured composition stands out for its mood of utter tranquility. 1. N ancy Dustin Wall Moure, William Louis Sonntag: Artist of the Ideal (Los Angeles: Goldfield Galleries, 1980), 19. 2. C osmopolitan Art Journal (December 1858), quoted in Moure, William Louis Sonntag, 11–12.

Oil on canvas, 24 × 40 inches Signed and dated lower left: W. L. Sonntag / 1855 Provenance: The Dana Galleries, Buffalo, New York, c. 1970; private collection, Buffalo, until 2010 Illustrated: Antiques 97, no. 1 (January 1970), 855.

Thomas Lochlan Smith (1835–1884) | Village Homes at the Close of Day, 1874

In the mid-nineteenth century America saw a rise in the popularity of paintings of winter. The names of some of the major artists, such as Thomas Birch, Régis-François Gignoux, and George Henry Durrie, have come down to us, but many others remain relatively unknown. One talented winter specialist was Thomas Lochlan Smith, an associate of the National Academy of Design originally from Scotland. After studying with George Henry Boughton in Albany, he moved to New York City in 1862 and exhibited his snow scenes nationally until his death in 1884, when the members of the National Academy paused to recall his art: The solemn quiet and repose of the passing day and the closing year, were in accord with his thoughtful temperament, and he depicted their weird beauty with the truthfulness of a devout and living worshipper. He lived alone in the shadow and seclusion of his studio, his dreams and fancies supplying the place of more real and stirring events.1

In one of Smith’s finest known works, Village Homes at the Close of Day, a man pulls a pallet of firewood across a frozen pond toward his cottage, where a blazing fire can be seen through the window. Beyond a snow-covered field, several more houses with illuminated windows can be seen clustered around a church steeple. The sky retains the pale glow of the setting sun, which reflects in the icy surface of the pond and partially silhouettes the bare tree branches that reach above the horizon. The first star of the evening is dimly visible in the lower sky. Smith’s detailed description of tree forms recalls the strongly naturalistic work of Asher B. Durand and the American Pre-Rapahelites from the 1850s and early 1860s, while the beautiful luminist sky was a popular feature of the moment. The palpable mood—solitary, reflective, yet quietly optimistic—is peculiar to Smith. 1. N ational Academy of Design minutes, December 8, 1884, quoted in David B. Dearinger, Paintings and Sculpture in the Collecton of the National Academy of Design (New York and Manchester, Vermont: Hudson Hills Press, 2004), 565.

Oil on canvas, 16 × 24 inches Signed and dated lower right: T. L. Smith / 74 Original plaque inscribed: Village homes at the close of day Provenance: private collection, New York State Note: This painting retains its original frame and plaque.

Alexander H. Wyant (1836–1892) | Autumn in the Adirondacks, c. 1872–75

After beginning his career in Cincinnati in 1857 with the help of George Inness, Alexander Wyant established himself in New York in 1863 with views of Ohio and Kentucky painted in a second-generation Hudson River School style. In 1865 and 1866 he developed his budding interest in geological forms through study with the Düsseldorf-trained landscape painter Hans Friedrich Gude in Germany, and then discovered John Constable’s work in England and sketched in Ireland and Wales. His subsequent work of the 1860s tends toward the craggy grandeur of German painting, but he also began to adopt the English fascination with atmosphere, sometimes uniting the two tendencies in works like the iconic Tennessee, 1866 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Along with many other American artists, Wyant looked to the work of John Frederick Kensett in the early 1870s, especially following the artist’s premature death in 1872. In his series of mountain lake subjects from this time, Wyant substantially altered his approach to composition in favor of Kensett’s taut linearity: instead of broad foregrounds and topographical renderings of receding mountains, the viewer encounters smaller, asymmetrical foregrounds and reductive distances. With his panoramas now cleared of much of their visual noise, Wyant was free to experiment with the atmospheric effects that would come to dominate his landscapes in the 1880s. Autumn in the Adirondacks vividly illustrates Wyant’s new priorities. A slice of shoreline in the lower left-hand corner, where sunlight catches the fluttering autumn foliage, provides a foothold of concrete form in a scene otherwise given over to the intangible. On the right, solid granite cliffs melt into their diffuse reflections, and the ridge behind them tapers into a dark plain blanketed by mist and low clouds. Higher clouds encircle the great mountain peak in the distance, so that it seems not to tower so much as to float above the landscape below. Wyant used high contrast and opposed warm and cool colors to charge the stormy scene with anticipation.

Oil on canvas, 20 × 30 inches Signed bottom center: A H Wyant Inscribed on verso prior to lining: Early S… North…. / Ptd by A H Wyant Provenance: Thomas Colville Fine Art, New Haven, Connecticut, c. 1983; Alexander Gallery, New York, c. 1987; private collection, Michigan, until 2010 Exhibited: Alexander Gallery, New York, The Hudson River School: Congenial Observations, September-October 1987, no. 34 (illustrated, as Adirondack Lake). Note: This work is listed on the Wyant Website by Anthony E. Battelle, ref. 116.018 (as Autumn Lake Scene).

Robert Salmon (1775–c. 1845) | Ailsa Craig: The Firth of Clyde, Scotland, 1835

The burgeoning port of Greenock, Scotland, which lies about 20 miles west of Glasgow along the River Clyde, offered Robert Salmon a wealth of shipping subjects to depict while he worked there from 1812 to 1822 and in 1825. Equally inviting were the sights along the Firth of Clyde, a large sea bay that extends from the mouth of the Clyde, near Greenock, southwest to the North Channel, between Scotland and Ireland. Perhaps the most sublime sight was Ailsa Craig, an 1,100-foot-high remnant of a long-extinct volcano that juts dramatically out of the water in the middle of the Firth. Ailsa Craig: The Firth of Clyde, Scotland depicts the geological wonder as seen from the north on the Isle of Arran. Beyond the small harbor in the left middle ground lies the island of Pladda, where a lighthouse built in 1790 marks the coast. The long, flat tail of Ailsa Craig extends toward the eastern coast of the Firth of Clyde in the left distance. On the rocky promontory in the foreground, Salmon included a man surveying the scene through a telescope, accompanied by his dog, and a woman and child picking fruit, flowers, or herbs. Local fishing vessels mingle with larger, seafaring ships on this great marine thoroughfare between Scotland and the rest of the world. Since Salmon probably first painted Ailsa Craig in 1827, most of his subsequent views of the subject—which was one of his favorites—were painted following his move to Boston in 1828. Although Salmon also painted views of Boston while living there, local collectors eagerly snapped up his English and Scottish views as well. Ailsa Craig: The Firth of Clyde, Scotland was painted in 1835, when he was near his “peak of productivity and prosperity,” according to the Salmon expert John Wilmerding.1 Of one small view of Ailsa Craig from 1840, with a light sky as in our painting, Salmon noted in his record book: “[I] think it the best picture I ever painted.”2 1. W ilmerding writes this of the following year, 1836. Wilmerding, Robert Salmon, 41. 2. Ibid., 98.

Oil on panel, 10 × 12½ inches Signed and dated on verso: No. 818 / Painted by Robert Salmon / 1835 Provenance: (probably) sale, Corinthian Hall, Boston, May 22, 1835; (possibly) Lydia Smith Russell or the William Ellery Channing family, c. 1835; (possibly) by descent in the family to Robert Wheaton Rivers or Rosalie Channing; Henry Channing Rivers, Northeast Harbor, Maine, until c. 1996; by descent in the family to a private collection, New England, until 2010; Godel & Co.; private collection Literature: John Wilmerding, Robert Salmon: Painter of Ship and Shore (Salem and Boston: Peabody Museum and Boston Public Library, 1971), 95, no. 818 (as Ailsa Craig).

Thomas Doughty (1793–1856) | View of Boston Harbor from Dorchester Heights, c. 1843 Despite critical acclaim, Thomas Doughty had a difficult time selling his landscapes in Philadelphia, so he moved to Boston in 1829-30, returned for a longer stay from 1832 to 1837, and visited again in 1843, finding considerably more patronage there. Living in Boston also gave Doughty the opportunity to paint seascapes on the coast nearby, such as The Glades at Cohasset, 1834, Lighthouse at Nantasket Beach, c. 1834 (both Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Coming Squall (Nahant Beach with a Summer Shower), 1835 (Art Institute of Chicago). View of Boston Harbor from Dorchester Heights, one of Doughty’s three known views of the harbor, combines his experiments in marine painting with a well-developed landscape in the foreground depicting rural Columbia Point, in what was then the town of Dorchester (Columbia Point is now home to the University of Massachusetts, Boston). A pair of figures gazes out to the northeast, past the South Boston peninsula on the left to Castle Island in the central middle ground, Governor’s Island (now part of Logan International Airport) behind it to the left, and probably Deer Island to the right. Mount Washington House, a large, elegant hotel built in 1834, can be seen on the far left.1 A lovely band of pink clouds hovers over the distant islands, and a warm glow suffuses the whole scene. Dorchester Heights, as this part of South Boston was called before the city annexed it in 1804, was the site of a crucial American maneuver in the early Revolutionary War. After the Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga, near Lake Champlain, in May 1775, Colonel Henry Knox and his men brought the fort’s cannons down to Boston through the harsh New England winter. General George Washington waited for the right moment, in March 1776, to rapidly fortify Dorchester Heights with the Ticonderoga cannons under cover of darkness. After a siege of eleven months, the British fleet and troops were forced to leave Boston in order to escape bombardment from the Americans’ superior position. 1. Th e building housed the Perkins Institute for the Blind beginning in 1839.

Oil on canvas, 14 × 20 inches Signed lower right: T Doughty Provenance: Christie’s, New York, May 30, 1986, lot 14; Berry-Hill Galleries, New York; private collection, California, until 2010

James E. Buttersworth (1817–1894) | Yachting in New York Harbor

The son of the English marine painter Thomas Buttersworth, James E. Buttersworth brought the English style of marine painting to New York when he immigrated there in 1847, as Robert Salmon had to Boston in 1828. Buttersworth made his name in the 1850s with paintings of clipper ships, which were reproduced by Currier & Ives. As American involvement in shipping declined and steamships outpaced the clippers, he turned to yachting subjects, depicting races up and down the East Coast. In Yachting in New York Harbor, a handsome vessel flying an American flag pitches toward the viewer as the sails fill with a strong wind from the east. The taut rigging stands out sharply against the hazy sky, and small crests of white foam break up the dark, choppy water; both effects convey the brisk conditions that the crew of ten men is working to harness. The viewer beholds the scene from a point in Upper New York Bay, looking northeast toward the mouth of the East River. On the left, the masts of many ships can be seen lining the Manhattan docks, and a full-rigged ship is visible at the left edge of the image, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The rounded structure at the southern tip of the island is Castle Garden, then the immigration center for New York State. On the right, Castle Williams, still an active fort at this time, appears at the tip of Governors Island, and the bluffs of Brooklyn Heights can be glimpsed beyond it. Together with Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island, Fort Gibson on Ellis Island, and Fort Jay on Governors Island, Castle Garden and Castle Williams were built as part of the Second System of coastal fortification begun in 1807 and first employed during the War of 1812. Both Castle Garden (now Castle Clinton) and Castle Williams are now historic sites.

Oil on artistboard, 8 × 12 inches Signed lower right: J E Buttersworth Provenance: an estate, until 2010

William W. Cowell (c. 1856–1910) | Incoming Tide, 1877

William W. Cowell was the son of Anna Cowell, a well-known actress. He grew up in Boston and came of age in Chicago, where his mother became the leading actress of McVickar’s Theater in 1864. After exhibiting marine paintings at the Brooklyn Art Association in 1869, he probably lived in New York from 1870 to 1872, and subsequently studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with the accomplished marine painter Edward Moran. He exhibited regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy during the late 1870s and also worked as an engraver. In 1883, after a possible trip to Ireland, Cowell moved back to Chicago, perhaps to take care of his aging mother. After his mother entered a retirement home in 1895, he began to exhibit his work again at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Society of Artists, and in 1903 the Chicago journal The Muse called him “probably the best painter of marines in the West.”1 He began to take summer sketching trips to Nova Scotia around 1900 and married a local woman there in 1905. Incoming Tide is one of the finest known examples of Cowell’s work. In a luminist style influenced by Francis A. Silva, Cowell depicted a number of ships off the coast of New England. These vessels range from schooners and small fishermen’s boats to a full-rigged ship on the left and a steamship on the horizon. Gulls fly low over the smooth sheets of water that lap at the beach in the foreground. The combination of the setting sun and the rising moon creates a beguiling mixture of warm and cool light that shimmers on the water and illuminates the distant cliffs on the right. 1. “Palette & Chisel,” The Muse 3, no. 5 (June 1903), 342.

Oil on canvas, 18 × 32 inches Signed and dated lower left: W W Cowell 1877 Provenance: James S. Earle Auction and Galleries, Philadelphia; Mr. and Mrs. Milton M. Sacks, Framingham, Massa chusetts; D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York; the Honorable Paul H. Buchanan, Jr., Indianapolis, 1984–2009 Exhibited: (possibly) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1879, no. 35 (as Moonrise at Sunset: New England Coast); (possibly) Louisville Industrial Exposition, Kentucky, 1879, no. 232 (as Moonrise, New England Coast).

Francis A. Silva (1836–1886) | On the Connecticut Shore, 1869

Francis A. Silva was one of those rare artists whose artistic vision appears fully formed seemingly from the moment they begin to work. His first known watercolor, Along the Coast, 1864 (private collection, Massachusetts), shows the firm, linear modeling and interest in light and atmosphere that characterized his work until his death. Aside from the watercolor and some pages in a sketchbook (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts), On the Connecticut Shore is one of Silva’s earliest works. It depicts several well-dressed men and women taking a leisurely stroll along the beach in the late afternoon. The figures serve several purposes within the composition: they remove any feelings of isolation, they lead the viewer’s eye back into the distance, and they invite the viewer to imagine him or herself in their place, as they contemplate the rolling waves and the setting sun. The rosy tint of the sand in the foreground mirrors the violet and pink edges of the dark clouds overhead, while notes of vivid green and orange found in the dinghy reappear in the seaweed strewn along the beach and the grass in the dunes. With an attention to atmosphere heightened through the selective use of strong color, Silva managed to convey both the sensory excitement of the seashore and the tranquility of the close of the day. Silva painted four other scenes of the Connecticut coast: two in oil, The Building of Race Rock Lighthouse, 1874 (private collection), and Old Wreck on Fisher’s Island, near New London, c. 1874 (unlocated); and two in watercolor and gouache, View near New London, Connecticut, 1877 (Brooklyn Museum, New York), and Along the Connecticut Shore, 1880 (private collection).

Oil on board, 6 × 12 inches Signed lower right: F. A. Silva Inscribed on verso: On the Connecticut Shore / F. A. Silva / 1869 Owner’s label on verso inscribed: Martin Provenance: Mr. or Ms. Martin, Manhasset, New York; George Thompson, New York State; the estate of George Thompson, until 2007

Addison T. Millar (1860–1913) | Moonlight Sail, 1899

Addison T. Millar’s studies with William Merritt Chase were an excellent introduction to modern currents in American painting. Probably on Chase’s recommendation, Millar subsequently traveled in Europe and North Africa, and he strengthened his technique in Paris in 1895 under Benjamin Constant at the Académie Julian and with the portrait painter Giovanni Boldini. While there, he would also have seen the work of Alexander Harrison, a prominent American expatriate who attracted many devotees during this period, such as Robert Henri, who was also in Paris in 1895. Although Harrison was probably best known for his plein-air figure paintings, his most innovative works were views of waves crashing onto the beaches of Brittany under varying weather and light conditions. While summering on Nantucket a few years later, Millar must have recalled Harrison’s example as he gazed out at the open water one evening. Unlike Millar’s bright Orientalist genre scenes and Impressionist figural landscapes, Moonlight Sail presents a meditative nocturne with an overriding blue-green tonality. The dark shadows in the swells and breaking waves summon the deep sounds and hypnotic repetition of the sea, while overlapping layers of thin waves, glinting in the light of a warm full moon, hint at the sea’s merrier side as they glide quickly toward the viewer across the sandy beach. Millar enlivened his tonal approach with broad strokes that conjure the volume and texture of the foamy crests and make the moon’s reflections seem to hover on the water. The painting is closely related to an oil of the same size entitled Siasconset, Nantucket, Massachusetts (private collection). Since Millar exhibited water colors of Nantucket subjects at the Boston Art Club in 1898 and 1899, our 1899 painting probably also depicts the view from Nantucket.

Oil on canvas, 18 × 30 inches Signed lower left: A. T. Millar / 99 Provenance: private collection, Rhode Island, until 2010 Related work: Siasconset, Nantucket, Massachusetts, oil on panel, 18 × 30 inches (private collection).

William A. Coffin (1855–1925) | Evening at Grez, France, c. 1881–82

The village of Grez-sur-Loing, on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau in France, became popular among artists in the late 1870s as an alternative to the nearby village of Barbizon. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson described the appeal of Grez during his first visit with his cousin, the artist and critic Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, in 1875: It lies out of the forest, a cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a quaint old church. The inn garden descends in terraces to the river; stable-yard, kail-yard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed with rushes and embellished with a green arbour. On the opposite bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly with willows and poplars. And between the two lies the river, clear and deep and full of reeds and floating lilies.1

The following year, the Americans John Singer Sargent, Theodore Robinson, Walter Launt Palmer, and Birge Harrison arrived in Grez, and by the 1880s the village was attracting a large number of Americans, including Alexander Harrison, Kenyon Cox, Bruce Crane, Willard Metcalf, Emil Carlsen, and Robert Vonnoh. William A. Coffin, who had studied in Léon Bonnat’s Paris atelier since 1878, spent the summer of 1881 in Grez and painted several views of the area during his stay. His Evening at Grez looks somewhat like Stevenson’s description of the town. An expanse of lawn with small trees and white flowers stretches down from a group of houses to the rushes at the river’s edge. Water lilies can be seen floating in the darker areas of the water, and a bench on the near bank provides a place to sit and watch them. The setting sun partially silhouettes the roofs and chimneys, and colors the clouds above, leaving the banks below in a cool half-light. Coffin’s flat, tonal approach is typical of the progressive Grez school of landscape painting that emerged from the colony at this time. 1. Q uoted in William H. Gerdts, “The American Artists in Grez,” reprinted in Laura Felleman Fattal and Carol Salus, eds., Out of Context: American Artists Abroad (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2004), 39.

Oil on panel, 17¾ × 14¼ inches Signed lower right: W. A. Coffin Old label on verso inscribed: Evening at Grez, France / W. A. Coffin / Holbein Studios / 146 West 55th Street NY Provenance: Beacon Hill Fine Art, New York

Edmund C. Tarbell (1862–1938) | The Turquoise Ring, 1894

During the 1890s, Edmund Tarbell painted sunny, plein-air figural works during the summer months and lower-key interiors during the winters. Although the plein-air paintings are better known today, it was the interiors, called “girl types” or “costume portraits,” that were “praised by the critics, awarded prize after prize by jurors,” beginning in 1893, and “became his signature pieces,” according to Tarbell scholar Laurene Buckley.1 Among these was The Turquoise Ring, which won the Gold Medal at the Art Club of Philadelphia in 1895 and was purchased by the Club at that time. Soon after, the Club displayed its new acquisition in Boston, where a critic marveled: I have never seen a work of Tarbell’s more lovely in color and sentiment than ‘Girl with Ring’ [The Turquoise Ring], the property of the Philadelphia Art Club. The color is mysterious and beautiful, and the story poetic.2

Nearly twenty years later, The Turqouise Ring was included in the group of twenty paintings that represented Tarbell at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. A critic declared The Turquoise Ring and The Mirror, c. 1900 (private collection), to be “among the most beautiful pictures in the whole collection.”3 The Turquoise Ring depicts an elegant young woman sitting in profil perdu and gazing at a ring on her finger, absorbed in thought. As in many of the “girl types,” her face is obscured in shadow, so that her graceful pose, and Tarbell’s color harmonies and rich brushwork, become the keys to interpreting her mood. The focus on aesthetic rather than literal content, as well as the subdued palette, is akin to James McNeill Whistler’s work, while the lady’s calm, balanced pose and profile view recall the sculptures of classical antiquity. Tarbell’s fusion of classicism and Impressionism in The Turquoise Ring can be understood as an early, important contribution to the culture of the American Renaissance, like the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the architecture of McKim, Mead, and White. 1. Buckley, Edmund C. Tarbell, 87. 2. “Loan Portraits,” Worcester Daily Spy, March 11, 1896, 7. 3. Barry, The Dream City, 213.

Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 inches Signed lower left: Edmund C. Tarbell Provenance: Art Club of Philadelphia, 1895–c. 1980; David David, Inc., Philadelphia, 1980; Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, May 29, 1981, lot 17; private collection, Los Angeles, until 2009 Exhibited: National Academy of Design, New York, Seventieth Annual Exhibition, 1895, no. 135 (as Girl with Ring); Art Club of Philadelphia, Seventh Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture, NovemberDecember 1895, no. 107 (as Girl with Ring; Gold Medal); Copley Society, Boston, Loan Exhibition of Portraits, March 1896, no. 240 (as Girl with Ring); St. Botolph Club, Boston, February-March 1898, no. 17; Panama–Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915–16, no. 3954 (as The Turquoise Ring); Copley Society, Boston, 1919, no. 13. Literature: “The Academy of Design. Second Notice,” New York Times, April 8, 1895, 5; “A Strong Exhibition,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, November 19, 1895, 7; “Gossip of the Clubs,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1895, 29; “In the World of Art,” New York Times, December 22, 1895, 20; “Loan Portraits,” Worcester Daily Spy, March 11, 1896, 7; Dora M. Morell, “A Boston Artist and His Work,” Brush and Pencil 3, no. 4 (January 1899), 201; Rose Virginia Stewart Barry, The Dream City: Its Art and Symbolism (San Francisco: W. N. Brunt, 1915), 213; Patricia Jobe Pierce, Edmund C. Tarbell and the Boston School of Painting 1889–1980 (Boston: Pierce Galleries, Inc., 1980), 220; Laurene Buckley, Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2001), 88–89 (illustrated). Illustrated: The Magazine Antiques 118, no. 6 (December 1980), 1104. Related works: An Amethyst, c. 1893, oil on canvas, 24 × 18 inches (Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey); Rosemary, 1897, oil on canvas, 27 × 20 (private collection); Adjusting the Hat (Head), c. 1900, oil on canvas, 30 × 25 inches (private collection).

Francis Coates Jones (1857–1932) | At the Garden Fountain

Francis Coates Jones’ At the Garden Fountain presents a beautiful image at once timeless and specific to its historical moment. An elegant lady lifts the hem of her dress as she bends down to fill a pitcher with water at a fountain. Her white dress is of the type fashionable just after the turn of the century, and she wears her golden hair in the period chignon. The flat, closed composition, use of the profile view, and tonal palette are typical of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American painting influenced by James McNeill Whistler. The timeless quality of the painting stems from its allusions to classical antiquity. The pitcher that the lady holds resembles an oinochoe, a type of ancient Greek vase, and the fountain is classically inspired as well. With its easily legible outlines, the flat composition resembles those found on Greek red-figure vases and Greek and Roman sculptural friezes. The marmoreal whiteness of both the fountain and the lady’s dress reinforce the image’s association with classical sculpture. Jones’ painting participated in the cultural movement known as the American Renaissance, which employed classical styles based upon the belief the United States had inherited the best qualities of Greek democracy and Renaissance humanism. In a particularly potent combination, Jones applied this nationalistic style to the prime turn-of-the-century symbol of American cultural sophistication, the ideal woman at leisure. The rhododendrons and foxglove or campanula that bloom behind her allude to her delicate and fecund nature, as well as to the popular upper-class pastime of gardening.

Oil on canvas, 23 × 19 inches Signed lower right: Francis C. Jones Provenance: private collection, New Jersey, until 2009 Exhibited: (possibly) Art Institute of Chicago, Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, OctoberDecember 1904, no. 237 (as At the Fountain).

Myron G. Barlow (1873–1937) | Wild Carnations

Myron Barlow grew up in Detroit and first studied at the Detroit Museum of Art School, but after studying in Paris, he settled in Étaples, an artists’ colony on the English Channel, near the Belgian border. Yet as a 1932 article in the Detroit News put it, Barlow remained “very much a Detroit painter. This is not only because he has returned to this city for a short visit almost every year since he first went abroad to study in 1894, but also because many of his best canvases may be found in Detroit homes.”1 One of Barlow’s best canvases, long held in a Michigan collection, Wild Carnations presents a young woman in peasants’ clothing sitting on a grassy hill filled with pink carnations. Her blonde hair falls from her loose bonnet as she bends her head to gaze at the blossom that she holds in her hand. The exuberance of the natural setting seems to evoke a richness of thought concealed by her calm demeanor. The young woman’s pink dress and sturdy shoes echo the pink flowers around them and contrast with the complementary green color of the grass. Warm sunlight divides her apron into creamy white and pale blue sections, and it bleaches patches of grass a light yellow-green, while leaving others a dark blue-green. Barlow used a closed composition with a high, obscured horizon line to flatten the image, and he reinforced this modern flatness through shallow modeling and the flickering, broken brushwork of the Impressionists. Yet Barlow’s extensive academic training also shows in the careful drawing and restful pose of the figure. The result is an appealing balance of aestheticism and naturalism, expression and description, and movement and repose. Wild Carnations was included in the Detroit Institute of Art’s 1938 annual exhibition, which showcased 34 of Barlow’s paintings as a memorial to the recently deceased artist. 1. “ Myron Barlow, Detroit Painter Awarded Legion of Honor,” Detroit News, August 7, 1932.

Oil on canvas, 40¼ × 40 inches Signed lower right: Myron Barlow Old label on verso inscribed: Wild Carnations / #28 [sic] Provenance: private collection, Michigan, c. 1950–2010 Exhibited: Detroit Institute of Arts, Annual Exhibition of American Art, 1938, no. 27.

Paul Cornoyer (1864–1923) | The Dewey Arch, New York, c. 1900

One of Cornoyer’s earliest known New York scenes is The Dewey Arch, New York, which depicts the temporary triumphal arch and surrounding colonnades that were erected in 1899 at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 24th Street, next to Madison Square, to honor Admiral George Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. The arch was a high point of the City Beautiful movement and a fervent expression of American patriotism. Several artists painted the arch before it was taken down in December 1900, including Charles Courtney Curran, whose Early Morning, Madison Square (The Dewey Arch), 1900 (National Arts Club, New York), incorporates the arch into the everyday life of the city by depicting street sweepers at work in front of it. Cornoyer took a similar approach: pedestrians and cabs fill the foreground and middle ground, and columns blocking a direct view of the arch serve to reduce its monumentality and integrate it into the streetscape. Curran depicted the arch in the early morning, when the pale light diminished the contrast between the gleaming white structure and the darker buildings and trees around it; Cornoyer achieved much the same effect by painting it on a rainy day, when it blended in with the gray sky and wet pavement. Cornoyer chose to depict the arch looking from the north, standing on Fifth Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. The view affords vistas down Fifth Avenue on the right and Broadway in the center distance, as well as a corner of Madison Square on the left. The portico and iron railing of the Madison Square Bank Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 25th Street appear at the right edge, and the Hotel Bartholdi (later occupied by the American Art Association), at Broadway and 23rd Street, looms behind the trees in the left distance. Shortly after the arch was taken down, the 22-story Flatiron Building would rise over the intersection.

Oil on canvas, 12 × 16 inches Signed lower left: Paul Cornoyer Provenance: Sotheby’s, New York, December 6, 1984, lot 128; private collection, New York, 1987–1999; Godel & Co.; private collection, California, 2000–2010 Related works: After the Rain, the Dewey Arch, Madison Square Park, New York, oil on canvas, 22 × 27 inches (Christie’s, New York, December 4, 1996, lot 223); Jean-François Raffaëlli, Dewey’s Arch, New York, 1899, oil on canvas, 25½ × 32 inches (formerly Berry-Hill Galleries, New York); Childe Hassam, Dewey’s Arch, 1900, gouache and watercolor on paper, 18 × 22 inches (private collection); Charles Courtney Curran, Early Morning, Madison Square (The Dewey Arch), 1900, oil on canvas, 22 × 18 inches (National Arts Club, New York).

Oliver D. Grover (1861–1927) | Wedding Day, Rialto Bridge, Venice, 1908

As a stop on the Grand Tour with scenic canals and great art, Venice attracted a steady trickle of American artists visiting Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. The publication of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–53), an appreciation of the city’s pre-modern virtues, seems to have heightened the interest of his adoring American public, and some of the more adventurous Hudson River School painters visited there, such as Sanford R. Gifford, William Stanley Haseltine, and Samuel Colman. The number of Americans swelled in the 1870s and 1880s as they followed John Singer Sargent, Frank Duveneck, and James McNeill Whistler to the city, and by the end of the century, Venetian scenes proliferated in the United States, due to the opportunities the water and light offered the Impressionist painter. One of the “Duveneck Boys” who followed the artist to Venice in 1880, Oliver D. Grover fell in love with the city and frequently returned to paint there. Wedding Day, Rialto Bridge, Venice is one of his more elaborate depictions of the Venetian canals. In the right middle ground, a crowd surrounds a bride and groom as they prepare to board a gondola, which has been decorated for the occasion with white draperies and blue ribbons. More gondolas tied to a row of high piers float in the left foreground and middle ground, and Venetian palazzi rise in the right background. The view culminates in a glimpse of the famous Rialto bridge in the left distance. The expansive pavement in the foreground attests to Duveneck’s continuing influence on Grover, while the lively palette suggests the broader currents of American Impressionism. Grover worked in this broadly brushed manner with great facility, achieving a calm, sunny effect worthy of Venice’s nickname, La Serenissima.

Oil on canvas, 24 × 30 inches Signed lower right: Oliver Dennett Grover Signed lower left: Oliver Dennett Grover / 1908 Provenance: from the artist to a private collection; Leonard Stark, Chicago; Harriman-Judd Collection, Los Angeles; Charles B. Taylor, Los Angeles; with Beacon Hill Fine Art, New York, c. 1996; private collection, until 2009 Exhibited: Cini Foundation, Venice, Venice from Nation to Myth, 1997.

Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932) | The Frozen Pond

In the 1870s Walter Launt Palmer painted sumptuous interiors bathed in natural light, and he added colorful Venetian seascapes to his repertoire following a trip there in 1881. It was not until his January won the prestigious Hallgarten prize at the National Academy in 1887 that he settled on the winter landscape as the primary subject of his art. Long praised for his use of color, Palmer had finally found the subject matter in which this talent could be fully appreciated, and he enjoyed a successful career as a painter in oil, watercolor, gouache, and pastel through the 1920s. In The Frozen Pond, the viewer looks past pristine snow banks toward a shimmering pond below. The leafless branches of deciduous trees and the boughs of evergreens rise on the hill leading down to the pond, and scattered stands of trees are dimly visible on the far bank. Hidden behind a cloud, the sun lights the clouds from behind, fills the sky with warmth, and cloaks the foreground in blue shadows. Because of his attention to tonal values, Palmer was able to convincingly render this highly specific light effect, and his mastery of color is evident in his choice of shades of blue and blue-green that convey shadowy snow, a sunny sky, and ice in half-light. Palmer also explored the textural possibilities of gouache in this work. He used thin strokes in the delicate foreground snow and broad strokes in the dramatically backlit clouds; he dragged a dry brush to suggest thin branches in the trees and diffuse clouds in the sky; and he indicated glittering ice with impasto.

Watercolor and gouache on paper, 18 × 24 inches Signed lower right: W. L. Palmer Inscribed on verso: The Frozen Pond

Guy C. Wiggins (1883–1962) | A New England Farm in Winter

The son of Carleton Wiggins, Guy Carleton Wiggins briefly studied architecture before enrolling at the National Academy of Design to become an artist like his father. He avoided his father’s animal subjects, finding success instead as a painter of winter scenes in New York; his reputation was confirmed in 1912 with the sale of The Metropolitan Tower to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Perhaps because of his architectural background, Wiggins was drawn to impressive buildings and monuments like Stanford White’s Washington Square Arch and Carrère and Hastings’ New York Public Library building on 42nd Street, as well as to New York’s remarkably bustling street life. In addition to the city scenes for which Wiggins is most famous, he painted numerous rural landscapes. Following in his father’s footsteps, Wiggins took an active role in the Impressionist artists’ colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, and bought a farm nearby in 1920. Like George Henry Durrie and John Twachtman before him, Wiggins found inspiration in the snow-covered Connecticut countryside. Unlike Wiggins’ city scenes, which emphasize the modernity of the urban environment, A New England Farm in Winter captures a New England essentially unchanged from Durrie’s depictions many decades earlier. Yet Wiggins presented this imagery in an utterly different style, one that suppresses detail in order to focus on the atmosphere of the scene. The emphatic, undifferentiated volume of passages like the farmhouse, woodpile, and fence created a spatial armature on which Wiggins could apply his careful observations of color and tone. Much of the painting’s mood derives from the soft tonal distinctions between falling snow, thin and deep snow, and trampled snow, while blue and purple trees behind the red brick house, echoed by warm leaves among the cool branches of the foreground tree, add a wintry color chord.

Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 inches Signed lower right: Guy Wiggins NA Inscribed on verso: New England Farm. Winter / Guy Wiggins. NA Provenance: private collection, Grosse Point, Michigan, until 2009; Godel & Co.; private collection, 2010

William Wendt (1865–1946) | Winter, Mt. Rainier, Paradise Valley, 1913

When John Muir climbed Mount Rainier, the highest peak in the Pacific Northwest, in 1888, he drew attention to the need for governmental protection of this natural wonder. The artist George Catlin had articulated the idea of a “nation’s park” in the 1830s, and a conservation movement that supported the idea had developed by the 1860s. Yellowstone National Park, created in 1872, was the first, Muir’s vision of Yosemite National Park was realized in 1890, and Mount Rainier National Park followed in 1899. Wendt painted several views of the park while in Washington State in 1913.1 Since automobiles had been allowed in the park beginning in 1907, it was probably relatively easy for him to reach Paradise, on the south slope of the mountain. He painted several views of Mount Rainier from there, as well as Winter, Mt. Rainier, Paradise Valley, looking away from the mountain to the south. Since the landscape has changed little over the past century, thanks to its protected status, it is possible to see how faithfully Wendt reproduced the view. Paradise Valley was still mostly covered in snow in this view, which was probably painted in the late spring. Beyond a hillside sloping down from the soon-to-be-constructed Paradise Inn (1916), a stream snakes through the valley, as it still does today. A forested ridge rises beyond Paradise Valley Road toward the jagged Tatoosh Range.2 While retaining a great deal of topographical information, Wendt treated forms broadly in order to emphasize the underlying structure of the landscape. The patches of pines on the far ridge form a bold two-dimensional pattern, while cubic forms describe the billowing clouds. Color plays a subtler, yet essential role, with blues shading the foreground hillside, creamy yellows lighting up the sunny valley, ochre and orange underneath the far foliage, and purple and pink in the mountains and clouds. 1. John Alan Walker, Documents on the Life and Art of William Wendt, 1865–1946, California’s Painter of the Paysage Moralisé (Big Pine, California: J. Walker, Bookseller, 1992), 50, quoted in Will South et al., In Nature’s Temple: The Life and Art of William Wendt, exh. cat. (Laguna Beach, California: Laguna Art Museum, and Irvine, California: The Irvine Museum, 2008), 246. 2. W inter Thaw, 1913 (private collection), and The Higher Altitudes, c. 1914 (Sotheby’s, New York, May 24, 1990, lot 127), probably depict the Tatoosh Range further to the west.

Oil on canvas, 30¼ × 40 inches Signed and dated lower right: ∙ William Wendt ∙ 1913. Original plaque inscribed: Winter – Mt. Ranier [sic], Paradise Valley Label on verso inscribed: Helen Schulze Burch Provenance: (probably) Paul Schulze, Chicago; his daughter, Helen Schulze Burch, Richmond, Virginia, by 1937; by descent in the family to a private collection, Chicago, until c. 2005; private collection Exhibited: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, The Burch-Schulze Collection of Masterpieces of American Painting, October-November 1937, no. 37 (catalogue, 16, 21; dated 1918). Related works: Winter Thaw, 1913, oil on canvas, 24 × 36 inches (private collection); The Higher Altitudes, c. 1914, oil on canvas, 39¾ × 49½ inches (Sotheby’s, New York, May 24, 1990, lot 127); Tahoma, 1913, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 inches (private collection); Untitled (Mt. Rainier), 1913, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 inches (estate of Helen R. Heller); Tahoma the Silent, 1914, oil on canvas, 40½ × 55 inches (private collection).

Edgar Payne (1883–1947) | A Rider with Packhorses in the Sierra

After working on farms in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas with his itinerant family, Edgar Payne set out on his own at the age of fourteen with the burning desire to become an artist. He took odd jobs, including painting signs, fences, houses, and stage scenery, finally exhibiting paintings in Chicago beginning in 1907. Soon after, on a 1909 trip to California, Payne found inspiration in the landscape around Laguna Beach, and love in the young San Francisco artist Elsie Palmer, whom he would marry in 1912. In 1917 the Paynes settled in Laguna Beach and assumed a leading role in the budding colony of California plein-air painters. The couple took many car trips to the highest points of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where Edgar loved to paint. A major example of Payne’s work, A Rider with Packhorses in the Sierra presents a scene of solitary endeavor amidst sublime natural scenery. A lone horseman leading a train of horses ascends a steep, rocky slope against the background of precipitous peaks that rise almost to the top of the composition. Payne faithfully recorded the singular appearance of the Sierra, with their barren brown slopes reaching far above the tree line, their prismatic ridges and peaks, and their fissures filled with snow. With a commanding breadth of touch, he also captured the effects of the full sunlight of midday, which brings out the green grass, the warmth of the foreground rocks, and the blue-gray shadows on the distant peaks. Before painting A Rider with Packhorses in the Sierra, Payne made a large oil sketch on the verso, which depicts a lake in the Sierra encircled by pines and dwarfed by a great cliff.

Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 inches Signed lower right: Edgar Payne Oil sketch on verso Provenance: by descent in the family to a private collection, Mexico City; private collection, 2006 Related work: Pack Train Climbing, pencil on paper, 10 × 10½ inches (Evelyn Payne Hatcher).

Ogden M. Pleissner (1905–1983) | Monday Morning, c. 1941

Brooklyn native Ogden Pleissner studied at the Art Students League of New York with George Bridgman and Frank DuMond for several years, perfecting his draftsmanship and technique in oil. While teaching at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in the early 1930s, he painted scenes of neighborhood life (including one acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1932), Western landscapes from his trips to Wyoming, and harbor views in New England. He worked in oil until the late 1930s, when he began to paint sporting scenes in watercolor. Pleissner traveled throughout the United States during the latter half of the 1930s, observing the country’s natural beauty but also the effects of the Great Depression, which were foremost on the minds of Regionalist artists at this time. From the look of their ramshackle country homes on stilts and without running water, the African-American subjects of Monday Morning may be sharecroppers in the South.1 Two men have gathered around a fire, on which a cauldron steams. Behind them, a woman bends over to wash clothes in a basin before hanging them on the line between two of the houses. Pleissner ennobled the hard lives of his subjects with a well-crafted composition and fluid, seemingly effortless strokes of his brush. Monday Morning won an Honorable Mention when it was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1941, where a critic described it as “superbly composed,”2 and when Pleissner showed it later that year in a large, enthusiastically received exhibition of contemporary watercolors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was featured in the museum’s bulletin. In 1944 Pleissner issued an edition of 275 prints based on a variation on the scene, also called Monday Morning. 1. A related work, Study for Monday Morning (Carolina Galleries, Charleston, South Carolina), may have been painted near Thomasville, Georgia. Pleissner also exhibited views of Florida at this time. 2. E dith Weigle, “International Water Color Exhibit Opens,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 20, 1941, G2.

Watercolor on paper, 17 × 27 inches Signed lower right: Pleissner Macbeth Gallery label on verso inscribed: Monday Morning / by / Ogden Pleissner Provenance: with Macbeth Gallery, New York, by 1941; Thomas K. Humphrey, Chicago; private collection, Chicago; Godel & Co.; private collection, New Jersey, 2010 Exhibited: Art Institute of Chicago, 20th International Exhibition of Water Colors, July-October 1941, no. 482 (awarded an Honorable Mention; illustrated in catalogue, pl. IV); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Special Loan Exhibition of Contemporary American Watercolors, OctoberNovember 1941, no. 3579.8. Literature: Edith Weigle, “International Water Color Exhibit Opens,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 20, 1941, G2; “Out of Town,” New York Times, July 27, 1941, X7. Illustrated: Hermann Warner Williams, Jr., “An Exhibition of Contemporary American Water Colors,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36, no. 10 (October 1941), 201. Related works: Study for Monday Morning, oil on board, 8 × 10 inches (Carolina Galleries, Charleston, South Carolina); Monday Morning, limited edition print (Samuel T. Shaw, 1944), edition of 275.

Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896–1969) | Woodcock Hunting, 1938

Aiden Lassell Ripley studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under Frank W. Benson. Awarded the school’s prestigious Paige Travelling Scholarship in 1923, he crisscrossed Europe and gained facility in the medium of watercolor in the process, exhibiting the results in Boston in 1926. Perhaps encouraged by Benson’s success with sporting subjects, in 1930 Ripley switched from exhibiting conventional fine art subjects to showing watercolors of his favorite pastimes, hunting and fishing. The enthusiastic response led him to focus thereafter on his classic images of life lived outdoors. Woodcock Hunting, from Ripley’s best period, depicts a hunter alertly watching the flight of a woodcock from the brush below. His pointer has frozen a few steps ahead, its hind legs tense with excitement. Saplings and branches in the immediate foreground partially block the view, suggesting the feeling of being in the field, as a member of the hunting party, at this crucial moment. The entire surface of the watercolor pulsates with vivid color. Bright sunlight bleaches the back of the hunter’s coat and streaks the warm forest floor with purple shadows, while dabs of cobalt blue lend a visual punch to shadows in the green and yellow pine trees, the reddish-brown brush, and the foreground rocks. Where the sky momentarily fades from a saturated light blue to a hazy cream color, the woodcock’s golden form appears. A touch of the brightest red at the hunter’s collar pulls him forward from the dazzling surface of the watercolor, posing the urgent question: can he shoot it?

Watercolor on paper, 19½ × 15¾ inches Signed and dated lower left: A. Lassell Ripley 1938 Watercolor sketch on verso depicting houses in summer

Frank W. Benson (1862–1951) | Down the Rapids, c. 1923

Frank Benson grew up hunting and fishing in Essex County, Massachusetts, and continued to take sporting trips until late in life. In the 1890s, he began to record scenes from his outings in black ink washes, which he eventually exhibited in the 1910s to favorable reviews. He also took up etching at this time, focusing on sporting subjects as well. It was not until 1921, when his son George suggested that he bring along a box of colors on a salmon-fishing trip, that Benson seriously engaged with the medium of watercolor. He was delighted with the results, for he could represent transient effects in full color. He later advised his daughter Eleanor: Those things which you do when you are freshly inspired and excited by the beauty of what you are seeing before you are important things. If you go back to them later and you think you will improve them by making them carefully, slicking them up, you will lose that important thing and there is no method of getting it back. There is a certain inspiration which comes when you work quickly and surely and [are] enthusiastic about the beauty of the light.1

In Down the Rapids, Benson captured the moment at which two men rowing a canoe begin their descent into the whitewater. The bowman paddles with short forward strokes, while the coxswain stands as he steers the vessel around the boulders in the left foreground. Bright morning light glares on the distant water and catches the edges of the trees and the figures’ dark forms. In the shadows, cascades of green and blue form the steep far bank, and vivid streaks of cobalt blue describe the deepest shadows. Benson evoked the churning rapids with loose parallel strokes of blue, green, and purple that rake over the laid paper, and he scratched the paper to create a foamy splash where the bowman lifts his paddle from the water. 1. Q uoted in Faith Andrews Bedford, “Frank W. Benson: Master of Light,” in Bedford et al., The Art of Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist, exh. cat. (Salem, Massachusetts: Peabody Essex Museum, 2000), 41.

Watercolor on paper, 16½ × 20 inches Signed lower left: F. W. Benson / ’2… Provenance: M. Knoedler & Co., New York; private collection, New York, c. 1930; by descent in the family until 2009

Edward Potthast (1857–1937) | Looking Out to Sea

In 1898 Edward Potthast made his first recorded trip to Maine, visiting Ogunquit, Prout’s Neck, Rockport, and Camden. He returned there frequently during the next decade in the company of the artists William S. Barrett, Lewis Henry Meakin, and George Bellows. A 1923 visit renewed his interest in the region, and many of his subsequent paintings depict the state’s shores. During this last period, likely on summer excursions to Ogunquit, Potthast painted a number of works in which he sidelined or eliminated figures to focus on waves crashing against a rocky shoreline. Like Childe Hassam’s similar subjects, Potthast’s coastal views could approach abstraction, and like George Bellows’ paintings of breakers at Monhegan, they also demonstrated the artist’s bold technique. More so than Potthast’s beach scenes, they have a visceral impact on the viewer. In Looking Out to Sea, the rocks push out toward the edges of the composition, inviting attention to the highly active foreground. Thick strokes of bright orange, yellow, and magenta over darker areas of red, brown, and green create the impression of light hitting the angular, faceted rocks. Potthast stirred the sea with a large amount of white impasto over layers of pale blue, turquoise, and green, indicating foam and the splash of breaking waves against the rocks. Two small figures, encompassed by the outline of the far rock, gaze into the hazy distance.

Oil on canvasboard, 8½ × 10½ inches Signed lower right: E Potthast Inscribed on verso: Looking out to sea Provenance: Godel & Co.; private collection, New York City, 2004–2010

Edward Potthast (1857–1937) | A Timid Bather

Edward Potthast worked capably in a number of late nineteenth-century styles before he found the one that became unmistakably his. After receiving initial instruction abroad in Antwerp and Munich, he painted in a brushy realist style, which brightened under the influence of Impressionism during further study in Paris. Finally, in New York in 1909, an exhibition of the Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla y Batista’s European beach scenes inspired Potthast to flood his own similar subjects with fluid brushwork and saturated color. Unlike many of Potthast’s beach scenes, A Timid Bather presents a view in the midst of the surf. On the left, a young boy in a yellow swimsuit reluctantly wades into deeper waters. His mother, in a dark green suit and red bathing cap, leads him by the hand, gesturing toward others frolicking further out and turning her head to encourage him with soothing words. To their right, the boy’s older sister, wearing a red suit and a large orange bow in her hair, needs no encouragement, for she bounds eagerly toward the bigger waves. Strong sunlight from the right picks out the figures from the thick foam and shallow water in the foreground, the glassy blue surface of the tops of the waves further out, and the deep blue-green troughs of breaking waves in the distance. Potthast’s lively paint handling adds texture and movement to this already vivid scene of a summer day at the beach.

Oil on canvasboard, 12 × 16 inches Signed lower right: E Potthast Inscribed on verso: Edward H Potthast / 222 W 59th NY City – / #002 – “A Timid Bather” / $ 300.00 Provenance: an estate, Southern California; private collection, 2005

Maurice Prendergast (1858–1924) | Figures by the Shore, c. 1900–02

During the 1890s, Maurice Prendergast worked primarily in watercolor and in monotype, a color printing process in which the artist paints thinly on a nonabsorbent surface, such as glass or metal, and then presses a piece of paper onto the painted surface. One to three increasingly faint impressions can be pulled from a single plate, so that each monotype is unique, and that few, if any, versions of a monotype exist. The result of the process is flat and luminous like a watercolor, but unlike in watercolor, the artist has more freedom to manipulate the paint once it has been applied to the surface. The thin paint on a monotype plate dries quickly, however, so the medium requires rapid execution, which lends an enforced spontaneity to the image. Prendergast’s monotypes show the pronounced influence of the Nabis, a group of French Post-Impressionists whose work incorporated the flat compositions of Japanese prints and Paul Gauguin’s simplified forms and patches of brilliant color. While retaining most of these characteristics, Prendergast used a cooler, silvery palette and more faintly defined forms in his monotypes, in keeping with his admiration for James McNeill Whistler. He also departed from the Nabis’ often Symbolist subject matter, preferring scenes of urban life and bourgeois leisure associated with the Impressionists. One of these scenes, Figures by the Shore, captures the excitement of a blustery day of recreation along the coast. The fluttering pastel dresses of four young girls playing in the left foreground stand out against the cool tones of the overcast background. Flat swirls of single colors indicate figures running in the right middle ground, and small, colorful strokes in the left distance suggest many more people congregating by the water. The broad branches of a tree, a string of billowing clouds, and the sweep of the dark ocean fill the narrow expanse at the top of the tipped-up composition. Prendergast’s vigorous technique coincides with his more regular adoption of oil painting in the years after 1900, and the overall effect prefigures his mature oils.

Monotype on paper with pencil additions, 9¾ × 13¾ inches Signed lower right: M / B / P Provenance: Maria Antoville Galleries, New York; private collection, New York City, c. 1965-2009 Related works: Children at Play, c. 1895– 97, monotype on paper, 109/16 × 1413/16 inches (Brooklyn Museum, New York); Beach Scene with Lighthouse, c. 1900–02, monotype on paper, 97/16 × 13⅞ inches (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Lighthouse, c. 1900–02, monotype on paper with watercolor and pencil additions, 9¼ × 15 inches (Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago); Summer Day, c. 1900–02, monotype on paper with pencil additions, 11¼ × 13¾ inches (Terra Foundation for American Art). Note: Prendergast scholar Nancy Mowll Mathews has confirmed the authenticity of this monotype.

John Marin (1870–1953) | White Mountain Country, Summer No. 29, Dixville Notch, No. 1, 1927 White Mountain Country, Summer No. 29, Dixville Notch, No. 1 is the first in a series of about 20 watercolors that John Marin painted on a 1927 automobile trip through New England. Returning from Deer Isle, Maine, at the end of the summer, he stopped at Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, a pass in the White Mountains near the Canadian border. The present work depicts two of the distinctive rock outcroppings that jut up from the steep slope of the notch. Marin described these jagged forms with crisp strokes of his brush, including a few hints of orange to catch the eye, and then applied light gray washes in the sky that follow the contours of the ridge, emphasizing its zigzag pattern. On the surrounding mountainside, descending strokes of dark green bleed into broad, light green washes, creating softer areas of foliage around the sharp rocks. By hatching, cross-hatching, and scribbling with his pencil under and over these forms, Marin solidified and ornamented them, while also indicating their flatness and adhesion to the picture plane. In modernist fashion, Marin left the edges of the image indistinct, so that the viewer sees the image as a fragment removed from nature, rather than a view glimpsed through the window of the frame. By mounting the watercolor on a mat with a black wash behind it, which serves as a striking border, he also presented the full sheet of paper, complete with pinholes at the corners, as a physical artifact of his artistic process. In addition, the transparent medium of watercolor and pencil allows the artist’s working methods to be fully legible. This work was owned for many years by Dorothy Norman, the lover and trusted deputy of Marin’s dealer, Alfred Stieglitz. This remarkable modern woman was also a poet, photographer, writer, editor, and political activist. She prominently displayed our watercolor, among several others by Marin, in her landmark International Style townhouse on New York’s Upper East Side.

Watercolor, graphite, and black chalk on paper, 17⅞ × 22¼ inches (including mount) Signed and dated lower left: Marin 27 Inscribed on verso in pencil: White Mountains [sic] Country / (29) Dixville Notch No. 1 / Marin 1927 Provenance: Dorothy Norman, New York, by 1944; to her son, Andrew Norman, 1997–2005; the estate of Andrew Norman; with Amy Wolf Fine Art, New York, 2005; private collection, Michigan Exhibited: Intimate Gallery, New York, Fifty New Paintings by John Marin, November-December 1928, no. 29; Art Galleries of the University of California, Los Angeles (and traveling), John Marin Memorial Exhibition, 1955-56, no. 33 (illustrated in catalogue). Literature: Dorothy Norman, “John Marin: Conversations and Notes,” College Art Journal 14, no. 4 (Summer 1955), 325 (illustrated); Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970), 586, no. 27.49 (illustrated); Ruth E. Fine, John Marin (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 8, 201, 214-17, 220, pl. 1. Illustrated: This work appears in five photographs of the interior of the Edward and Dorothy Norman House, 124 East 70th Street, New York City, taken by the firm Gottscho-Schleisner in 1944. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (LCG612-T01-44878, -44879, -44883, -44945, -44946); the work also appears in a photograph of the interior of Dorothy Norman’s house in East Hampton, New York, taken by Eric Kroll in 1960 and reproduced in Dorothy Norman, Encounters: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), pl. 25. Related works: White Mountain Country, Summer No. 30, Dixville Notch No. 2, 1927, watercolor on paper, 14¾ × 195/16 inches (formerly Kennedy Galleries, New York).

Milton Avery (1885–1965) | The Human Merry Go-Round, c. 1932

In 1927 Milton Avery began to paint genre scenes in gouache on construction paper. Less formal than his works in oil, the gouaches allowed him to experiment with a looser touch and unusual ideas and subject matter, which would eventually filter into his oils and shape his iconic work of the 1940s and 1950s. These scenes of daily life and leisure introduced a note of gaiety into an oeuvre previously dominated by portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Like Ashcan School and American Scene painters such as John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and Reginald Marsh, Avery began to depict beaches and amusement parks, musicians and bands, and especially circus and vaudeville acts. The saltimbanques of Pablo Picasso’s Rose Period may have encouraged Avery to adopt acrobats and circus performers as subjects in the early 1930s, and the influence of Henri Matisse’s dancers frequently appears in these gouaches. The Human Merry Go-Round presents a male performer bracing himself and holding his arms wide apart as a woman appears to lean into him. Their act is not entirely clear: presumably the woman keeps her body stiff, rests her head on the man’s chest, and pivots on her toes as he moves around her. However, a vertical stroke of black between the woman’s head and the man’s mouth suggests other possibilities: either the man pivots the woman by means of a rope that he holds in his mouth, or he whirls her around in the air using only this rope held in his mouth! If difficult to imagine, this last interpretation is certainly borne out by the anxious, strained look on the man’s face. As Barbara Haskell notes, “comic exaggeration … allowed Avery to explore serious formal considerations without appearing ponderous.”1 In this case, the artist was interested in the way in which the man’s body envelops the woman’s, and in how a three-dimensional arrangement flattens into solid patches of color. 1. Haskell, Milton Avery, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), 33.

Gouache on paper, 16¾ × 11 inches Signed lower right: Milton Avery Provenance: the artist’s estate; private collection, New York City, c. 1982–2009 Note: A letter of authenticity from the estate of Milton Avery, dated May 19, 1982, accompanies this work.

Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) | Coney Island with New York Police Helicopter, 1953

The leading urban realist Reginald Marsh took his subjects almost entirely from the streets and public spaces of New York City. The bustling metropolis provided endless opportunities to paint crowded sidewalks, subways, vaudeville, burlesque, and movie theatres, amusement parks, and beaches. Marsh caricatured his mostly working-class subjects sympathetically, satirically, and with sheer aesthetic delight. Coney Island with New York Police Helicopter depicts a riotous scene at Coney Island in Brooklyn. Since it was only a subway ride away for most New Yorkers, they thronged this beach and the amusements at nearby Luna Park on the hottest days of the summer. Scantily clad women ride on the shoulders of burly men; other women stride and pose; and men run and yell. A latterday Michelangelo, Marsh harnessed his thorough understanding of anatomy to conceive of myriad male and female poses that weave into the larger body of the crowd. He reveled in this spectacle of bared flesh and bad manners, which he found to provide an incomparably vital portrait of American life. Marsh painted this work in egg tempera, a transparent medium used by early Renaissance artists but largely abandoned in recent centuries in favor of opaque oil paint. After struggling with oil, Marsh revived tempera in 1929 because it allowed him to work rapidly and highlight his accomplished draftsmanship, and it was the temperas that secured his reputation in the 1930s. As he continued to work in the medium in the 1940s and 1950s, Marsh increasingly used tempera like ink, so that works like Coney Island with New York Police Helicopter have the flowing, linear character and luminosity of a drawing as well as the color, texture, and substance of a painting.

Tempera on board, 18 × 24 inches Signed and dated lower right: Reginald Marsh 1953 Provenance: private collection, New York City, c. 1960s–2009 Related works: Coney Island Beach, 1953, egg tempera and ink on fiberboard, 18 × 24 inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.).

Ben Shahn (1898–1969) | Summit Conference, 1955

Ben Shahn developed a taste for social realism in the early 1930s when he treated the theme of recent American court cases in which leftists had been wrongly convicted. He subsequently joined the American Scene painters in creating government murals and tempera paintings depicting the hardships of the Great Depression, and he made posters for the war effort during World War II. While the end of the war brought peace and professional success for Shahn, it also ushered in an era of mounting Cold War tensions and McCarthyist attacks on the artist. With the censure of Senator McCarthy in 1954 and the gestures of peace made at the Geneva Summit of the Big Four world leaders in 1955, however, Shahn must have been somewhat relieved. His Summit Conference depicts, from left to right, the representatives in Geneva: Russian prime minister Nicolai Bulganin, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, British prime minister Anthony Eden, and French prime minister Edgar Faure. For this work, Shahn returned to the subtle caricatures he had used in his early trial paintings, and he even reprised the setting from Apotheosis, 1932-33 (private collection). Eden looks like the dapper Conservative aristocrat that he was, Faure appears disengaged, caught up in his own lofty rhetoric, and the ruddy-faced Bulganin looks somewhat devilish, with his furrowed eyebrows and pointy ears, nose, widow’s peak, and goatee. Eisenhower, whom Shahn had satirized in a 1952 election poster, seems the most level-headed of the group, if only because of his lack of expression. While Shahn certainly saw the humor in this uncomfortably close assemblage of odd characters, the scene must also have appealed to him as a step toward the peace and freedom he so ardently desired.

Tempera on board, 21 × 17 inches Signed lower right: Ben Shahn Provenance: Downtown Gallery, New York; Beatrice Orenstein, New York; private collection, New York City, 1960–2009

Robert Gwathmey (1903–1988) | Man with Hoe, c. 1950

After teaching in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and painting a mural for the Federal Works Agency during the 1930s, Virginia native Robert Gwathmey established his reputation in the early 1940s with sympathetic images of African-American sharecroppers. Although his artistic career was far removed from their poor, hardworking existence, he visited their farms and even picked tobacco in order to accurately represent their experience. At a time of increasing awareness about the racial divide, especially in the South, Gwathmey’s images of sharecropping symbolized the unequal status quo that had existed since Reconstruction. Gwathmey’s works of the 1940s reached back to the nineteenth-century origins of the realist movement for their inspiration. As Gwathmey scholar Michael Kammen points out, works like Jean-François Millet’s Man with a Hoe, 1860–62 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), provided a visual language in which to describe agrarian toil, which Gwathmey clearly took up in his own monumental treatments of lone sharecroppers. Yet Gwathmey’s stark, angular works, which denied any natural unity between the worker and the land, were at once more strident in their condemnation of the conditions they described and more optimistic in their presentation of the workers as strong, sensitive people.1 In Man with Hoe, a farmer in blue overalls and a warped hat stoops down to till the soil. Seen from below, the man looms large over the flat landscape and the small house in the distance, even as his bent back tells the story of his labors and the high sun indicates that the day’s work is far from over. Like the medieval stained-glass windows that Gwathmey admired, the figure is made up of faceted areas, each painted in one solid color. Together with the background, they add up to a pleasing color harmony anchored on the paring of pink with green and blue with brown. 1. Kammen, Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 40ff.

Oil on canvas, 18 × 14 inches Signed lower left: Gwathmey Provenance: Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York; private collection, New York City, 1979–2009 Related works: Man with Hoe, watercolor and black ink on paper laid down on board, 12⅝ × 9½ inches (Christie’s, New York, January 24, 1990, lot 217); Man with Hoe, 1944, oil on canvas, 13 × 9 inches (Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.); Poll Tax Country, 1945, oil on canvas, 41¼ × 28¼ inches (Hirschhorn Museum); Workers on the Land (Dirt Farmers), 1946, oil on canvas, 30¼ × 40¼ inches (Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman); Across the Tracks, 1946, oil on canvas, 30¼ × 36 inches (private collection).

Artist Biographies

Milton Avery (1885–1965) Born in Sand Bank, New York, near Lake Ontario, Milton Avery moved with his family to Wilson Station, near East Hartford, Connecticut, in 1898. After his father died in 1905, he had to support the family, but, determined to become an artist, he took night classes, and later worked the night shift while studying art during the day. Following his marriage in 1926, Avery moved to New York City, where he pursued abstraction despite the dominance of social realism in American art at that time. He was later acknowledged as a major American modernist painter and as a source of inspiration for the early Color Field painters, including his friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Avery’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Myron G. Barlow (1873–1937) Myron Barlow was born in Ionia, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit. After receiving initial instruction at the Detroit Museum of Art School and the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1894 he moved to Paris for several years, studying with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts and Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Paul Benjamin-Constant at the Académie Julian. Barlow settled in Étaples, an artists’ colony on the English Channel, near the Belgian border, but visited Detroit nearly every year until his death in 1937. He became the first American member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1907 and a knight of the Legion of Honor in 1932. Barlow’s work can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Historical Society, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, France. Frank W. Benson (1862–1951) Frank Weston Benson was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1880. After studying in Paris at the Académie Julian with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre from 1883 to 1885, he returned to teach at the Museum School. Benson adopted an Impressionist style in the 1890s, depicting sporting subjects and women at leisure, and joined the Ten American Painters, an Impressionist group, in 1898. Along with his fellow teacher Edmund Tarbell, he exerted a tremendous influence on Boston painting in the early twentieth century.

Benson’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. James E. Buttersworth (1817–1894) James Edward Buttersworth was the son of the English marine painter Thomas Buttersworth. He was born in 1817 on the Isle of Wight in England and immigrated to the United States around 1847. He worked for the lithographer Nathaniel Currier, and later for Currier & Ives, which disseminated Buttersworth’s work to a wide audience. During the 1850s Buttersworth became known for portraits of clipper ships, and in the 1860s and 1870s adopted yachting as his primary subject. He recorded many America’s Cup races as well as individual yachts and harbor scenes. Buttersworth’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; and the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Virginia. John Carlin (1813–1891) Born in Philadelphia, John Carlin was remarkable in his day as a deaf-mute painter and poet. After graduating from the Pennsylvania Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in 1825, he studied art in Philadelphia from 1833 to 1834, in London in 1838, and subsequently with Paul Delaroche in Paris, before returning to the United States in 1841. Based in New York City, he became best known for his landscapes and genre scenes. He was also a leading advocate for the deaf. Carlin’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; Smithsonian American Art Museum and Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C.; and the Detroit Institute of Arts. William A. Coffin (1855–1925) Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, William Anderson Coffin graduated from Yale University in 1874. He returned to the Yale Art School and then left for Paris, where he studied in Léon Bonnat’s Paris atelier from 1878 until 1881. He settled in New York in 1882 and made a name for himself as a painter of tonalist landscapes and genre scenes. He was also a leading art critic of the time and an important organizer of the artistic sections of the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901, and the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, 1915.

Coffin’s work can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New–York Historical Society, and National Academy Museum, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Paul Cornoyer (1864–1923) Born in Saint Louis, Paul Cornoyer began his artistic education at the Saint Louis School of Art, painting in the Barbizon style then in vogue. From 1889 to 1894 he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, Louis Blanc, and JeanPaul Benjamin-Constant. He returned to Saint Louis at the end of his studies but moved to New York in 1898 at the encouragement of William Merritt Chase. There he made his reputation as a tonalist painter of the city’s fashionable districts. Cornoyer’s work can be found in the Museum of the City of New York, Newark Museum, New Jersey; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Saint Louis Art Museum. William W. Cowell (1856–after 1910) Relatively little is known about William Wilson Cowell. He grew up in Boston and later in Chicago, where his mother was a successful actress. After a brief stint in New York from around 1869 to 1872, he studied with Edward Moran at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Under the influence of Moran, Cowell began to exhibit marine paintings in the 1870s, and he became well known for them in Chicago in the 1890s. After 1900 he traveled frequently to Nova Scotia in search of subject matter. Thomas Doughty (1793–1856) The young Philadelphian Thomas Doughty gave up his successful leather business in 1820 for a career as a landscape painter. Despite early public recognition of his talents, he struggled to make a living due to the anemic demand for landscapes at the time. As a result, Doughty left for Boston in 1828, where he eventually met with success in the 1830s, as the market caught up with him. He traveled to England in 1837 and 1838, subsequently moving to New York, and visited Europe again from 1845 to 1847. Doughty’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Oliver D. Grover (1861–1927) Born in Earlville, Illinois, Oliver Dennett Grover found his artistic home in nearby Chicago, where he first studied at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1877 to 1879. Next, Grover traveled to Munich to study at the Royal Academy, and he became the youngest

of the “Duveneck Boys” who followed Frank Duveneck to Venice in 1880. After a stint at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1883, he returned to Chicago in 1884, where he began to teach at the Art Institute. He remained a leading figure in the Chicago art world for many years. Grover’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Union League Club of Chicago, John H. Vanderpoel Art Association, Chicago; Oregon Public Library, Illinois; Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana; Cincinnati Art Museum, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Seymour Guy (1824–1910) Seymour Joseph Guy was born in Greenwich, England. After he was orphaned as a child, he struggled against the wishes of his guardian and eventually succeeded in becoming an apprentice to the female portrait painter Ambrosini Jerome in 1847. Guy arrived in the United States in 1854 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. He soon applied his polished technique to charming scenes of children, which were popular among the major collectors of the day. He worked in the Tenth Street Studio Building from 1863 until his death in 1910. Guy’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and New–York Historical Society, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Robert Gwathmey (1903–1988) Robert Gwathmey was born in Manchester, Virginia. From 1925 to 1926 he studied at the Maryland Institute of Design in Baltimore and from 1926 to 1930 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Franklin Watkins, Daniel Garber, and George Harding. He traveled to Europe in 1929 and 1930, and again from 1949 to 1950. He taught for most of his career, first at Beaver College in Glenside, Pennsyvlania, from 1930 to 1937, then at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1939 to 1942, and at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1942 until 1968. He retired to Amagansett, Long Island. Gwathmey’s work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. George Henry Hall (1825–1913) George Henry Hall was born in Manchester, New Hampshire. He traveled with Eastman Johnson to Düsseldorf in 1849, and Hall continued his studies in Germany, France, and Italy until 1852. He traveled again to Spain in 1860 and 1866, Italy in 1872, Egypt and Palestine in 1875, Rome from 1883 to 1887, and Rome and Paris in the 1890s. Although he was also a figure painter, Hall

was best known for his still lifes of fruit, flowers, and the exotic bric-a-brac that he collected during his travels. Hall’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. George Harvey (1799–1880) Born in Tottenham, England, George Harvey moved back and forth between England and the United States several times during his life. During his first stay in America, from 1827 to 1830 or 1831, he traveled through the Western frontier, painting portrait miniatures. He returned to the United States in 1833 and built a house near Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he created atmospheric watercolors of the Hudson Valley that were reproduced in Harvey’s Scenes of the Primitive Forest of America, at the Four Periods of the Year (1841). He continued to cross the Atlantic for nearly twenty years, visiting Florida and Bermuda during the 1870s. Harvey’s work can be found in the collections of the National Academy Museum, New–York Historical Society, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. John William Hill (1812–1879) John William Hill was born in London to the engraver John Hill, and he moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1819 and to New York in 1823, where he was apprenticed to his father. As a topographical artist for the New York State Geological Survey from 1836 to 1841, he became highly skilled in landscape painting. Hill was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art in 1863 and a prominent figure in the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. His son, John Henry Hill, carried his father’s style and ideals into the early twentieth century. Hill’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New–York Historical Society, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Francis Coates Jones (1857–1932) Baltimore native Francis Coates Jones was the younger brother of the plein-air landscape painter Hugh Bolton Jones. Francis Jones decided to become a painter in 1876 after visiting the studio of the American painter Edwin Austin Abbey in London, and he spent the following year studying with his brother at the artists’ colony in Pont-Aven, Brittany. In 1878 he began to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Henri Lehmann; Jones continued his studies at the Académie Julian under Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. He settled in New York in 1884 and found immediate favor in the art world with his finely executed figure paintings.

Jones’ work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts; Peabody Institute, Baltimore; and the Richmond Art Museum, Indiana. George Cochran Lambdin (1830–1896) George Cochran Lambdin grew up in Philadelphia and probably received his early artistic training from his father, the portraitist James Reid Lambdin. He traveled to Europe in the mid-1850s, and began to exhibit genre scenes during the 1850s and 1860s, including Civil War scenes. By the early 1870s, however, he had turned to flower painting, likely under the influence of John La Farge. At his home in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, Lambdin cultivated a rose garden, which supplied him with many of his subjects. Lambdin’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Saint Louis Art Museum. John Marin (1870–1953) Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Marin was raised in Weehawken. He abandoned an early career as an architect to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1899. He continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York, and he traveled in Europe from 1905 to 1909, absorbing the revolutionary developments then occurring in European art. While in Paris in the summer of 1909, Marin met the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who showed Marin’s work at his galleries in New York and championed Marin as one of America’s most important modern artists. Marin’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art and Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) Reginald Marsh was born in Paris to American parents and grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, and New Rochelle, New York. After graduating from the Yale Art School in 1920, he moved to New York City and worked as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, the Daily News, and the New Yorker. He took classes at the Art Students League on the side, where his teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller shaped Marsh’s mature style. Marsh painted murals for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s and emulated the Old Masters by painting in tempera. Marsh’s work can be found in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Addison T. Millar (1860–1913) Addison Thomas Millar was born in Bazetta Township, Ohio. He first studied with DeScott Evans in Cleveland in 1879. After running a photography gallery in Michigan for several years, Millar moved to New York around 1891 to study at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase. In 1894 and 1895 he traveled to Spain, Holland, and Algeria, and he studied in Paris with Giovanni Boldini and with Jules-Joseph Benjamin-Constant at the Académie Julian. Returning to New York, he worked as a painter and etcher. Around 1907 he moved to the artists’ colony in Silvermine, Connecticut. Millar’s work can be found at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Smithsonian American Art Museum and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932) The son of the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, Walter Launt Palmer was born in Albany, New York. He studied with Frederic E. Church from 1870 to 1872, and traveled in Italy and France in 1873 and 1874. He studied with Carlous-Duran in Paris in 1874 and again in 1876. Interior scenes dominated his early work, and he also painted Venetian scenes after a trip there in 1881. Palmer found his most enduring theme in the snowy American landscape, to which he turned almost exclusively after winning the second Hallgarten prize at the National Academy of Design in 1887. He later traveled to Mexico, Canada, Alaska, Egypt, and East Asia. His successful career lasted through the 1920s. Palmer’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Edgar Payne (1883–1947) Born in Washburn, Missouri, Edgar Alwin Payne spent an itinerant childhood working on farms in Arkansas and Texas. After painting sets in Dallas and Chicago, he began to exhibit paintings in Chicago around 1907. On a 1909 trip to California, Payne found inspiration in the landscape around Laguna Beach, and after several years working on mural commissions, he settled there in 1917, assuming a leading role in the budding colony of plein-air painters. He often sketched in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and he toured Europe from 1922 to 1924. He settled in Los Angeles in 1932. Payne’s work can be found in the collections of the National Academy Museum, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Birmingham Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860) A son of the painter and polymath Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt Peale was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Philadelphia. He began an auspicious career as a portrait painter at the age of sixteen, and soon had the privilege of painting George Washington from life. He interrupted his artistic career at intervals to travel to England, France, and Italy. He spent much time in Baltimore, where he founded two museums and a utility company, and later lived in New York and Boston before spending his last years in Philadelphia. Peale’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; and the National Gallery of Art and United States Senate, Washington, D.C. George W. Platt (1839–1899) Born in Rochester, New York, George Platt graduated from the University of Rochester in 1860. Subsequently, he spent several years as a draftsman on Major John Wesley Powell’s geological surveys in the West. He studied in Munich from 1871 until at least 1873, and he continued his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts around 1876. During the 1880s, he was based in Chicago and taught at the Chicago Society of Decorative Art, and he taught at the University of Denver during the 1890s. Platt’s work can be found in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Chicago Historical Society, Denver Art Museum, and the Colorado Historical Society, Denver. Ogden M. Pleissner (1905–1983) Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ogden Minton Pleissner grew up painting and drawing. In 1922 he began attending classes at the Art Students League, where he studied with Frank DuMond for several years. Although his pictures were selling regularly, Pleissner took a teaching job at the Pratt Institute in 1930, in order to make ends meet during the Great Depression. He worked as an artist for the Air Force and a European correspondent for Life during World War II, and he returned to Europe many times after the war. In 1947 he built himself a studio in Pawlet, Vermont. Pleissner’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth. Edward Potthast (1857–1927) Edward Henry Potthast was born in Cincinnati and began studying at the newly founded McMicken School of Design. During the 1880s, he also studied abroad at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Royal Academy in Munich, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and exhibited at the Paris Salon until 1892. He moved to New York in 1895 and painted genre scenes and landscapes along the New England coast at Cape

Ann and in Maine, gradually adopting the Impressionist style for which he would become best known. Potthast’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cincinnati Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Maurice Prendergast (1858–1924) Born in Newfoundland, Maurice Brazil Prendergast moved with his family to Boston at the age of ten. He began his career as an illustrator but left for Paris in 1891 to train at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. His art quickly found recognition in America following his return to Boston in 1894. Italy beckoned him in 1898, and he visited France twice more, in 1907 and 1914. Prendergast exhibited with the Eight in 1908 and he was an organizer of the 1913 Armory Show, after which he moved to New York City. His brother was the artist and frame designer Charles Prendergast. Prendergast’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896–1969) Aiden Lassell Ripley was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and began his artistic training at the Fenway School of Illustration before serving in the Army during World War I. He then studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Frank W. Benson, who left a lasting influence on his work. Ripley traveled throughout Europe on a fellowship from 1923 to 1925. In 1932, as his career was taking off, he settled in Lexington, Massachusetts, but frequently took trips up and down the East Coast that combined hunting, fishing, and sketching. Ripley’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; Canton Museum of Art, Ohio; Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Severin Roesen (c. 1815–c. 1872) Severin Roesen probably lived in Cologne, Germany, before immigrating to the United States in 1848. His images of fruit and flowers, which were influenced by the Düsseldorf school of stilllife painting, met with early success in New York at the American Art-Union. He left New York sometime in the mid-to-late 1850s, however, and began to paint in a number of Pennsylvania towns, such as Harrisburg and Huntingdon. He settled in Williamsport in 1860 or 1861, producing a large number of paintings, but left there around 1872, leaving no further records. Roesen’s work can be found in the collections of The Metro politan Museum of Art, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum,

artford, Connecticut; Smithsonian American Art Museum, H Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the White House, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Robert Salmon (1775–c. 1858) The marine painter Robert Salmon was born in Whitehaven, England, where he executed his first paintings. He was in London from 1802 to 1806, Liverpool from 1806 to 1812, and Greenock, Scotland, from 1812 to 1822. After returning to Liverpool, Greenock, and London for short periods, he immigrated to the United States in 1828. His work was well received in Boston, where he remained until 1842. His fine draftsmanship and attention to atmospheric effects influenced subsequent American marine painters, especially Fitz Henry Lane, Albert Van Beest, and William Bradford. Salmon’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ben Shahn (1898–1969) Ben Shahn was born in Kovno, Lithuania, and moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York, in 1906. He was apprenticed to his uncle, a lithographer, in 1913, but he continued his academic studies at night, and took classes at New York University, City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design from 1919 to 1922. He traveled to Europe and North Africa from 1924 to 1925 and went abroad again from 1927 to 1929. He painted a number of murals for government agencies during the 1930s and gained widespread recognition as a fine artist during the 1940s. Shahn’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of the City of New York; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Francis A. Silva (1835–1886) Francis Augustus Silva was born in New York City and served in several New York militias during the 1850s. He attained the rank of captain at the beginning of the Civil War, but he soon became seriously ill, probably due to malaria, and had bureaucratic difficulties in regaining a command. In the meantime, he found his vocation as an artist, and became known in the 1870s for his luminist paintings of the New England coast, the Hudson River, New York Harbor, and the beaches of Long Island and New Jersey. He moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1880. Silva’s work can be found in the collections of the New–York Historical Society and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.

Thomas Lochlan Smith (1835–1884) Thomas Lochlan Smith was born in Glasgow, Scotland, but moved to the United States at an early age. He is first recorded in 1859 in Albany, New York, where he studied with the genre and landscape painter George Henry Boughton and established a studio. By 1862, he had moved to New York City, but he spent some summers in upstate New York. He became an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1869 and exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Smith’s work can be found in the collections of the National Academy Museum, New York; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York; and the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts. William Louis Sonntag (1822–1900) William Louis Sonntag was born in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Cincinnati. It is not known whether he trained with a local artist or was self-taught, but by the early 1850s he was the leading artist in Cincinnati. After trips to Europe in 1853-54 and 1855-56, Sonntag moved to New York City in 1857. He continued to travel to Europe in the 1860s and along the East Coast into the 1870s. His son, William Louis Sonntag, Jr., was also an artist. Sonntag’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New–York Historical Society, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Edmund C. Tarbell (1862–1938) Born in West Groton, Massachusetts, Edmund Charles Tarbell apprenticed at a lithography firm as a teenager. Refusing to go to college, he instead attended the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1879 to 1884. After studying at the Académie Julian in Paris and traveling in Europe for two years, Tarbell returned to Boston in 1886 and enjoyed a highly successful career. Along with his friend Frank W. Benson, he was an influential instructor at the Museum School from 1890 to 1912, and he later served as principal of the Corcoran School of Art. Tarbell’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; and the National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Jerome Thompson (1814–1886) Jerome Thompson was born and raised in Middleborough, Massachusetts, but left his disapproving parents at the age of 17 to become an artist. In 1835 he moved to New York City, where he first worked as a portrait painter. In the late 1840s he began to paint genre scenes and landscapes based on his travels throughout

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New England, and he studied in England from 1852 to 1854. Following a trip to the Midwest in 1861, he painted frontier scenes and American Indian subjects. By the 1860s Thompson’s paintings were selling briskly and were widely distributed as chromolithographs. Late in life he retired to an estate in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, which he named “Mount Jerome.” Thompson’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Academy Museum, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Cincinnati Art Museum, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. William Wendt (1865–1946) William Wendt was born in Bentzen, Germany, and immigrated to Chicago in 1880. He first studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and received his first recognition as an artist in the 1890s. Wendt traveled to Europe in 1898 and 1903, and to California in 1894 and 1905. He moved to Los Angeles in 1906 and settled at the Laguna Beach artists’ colony in 1918. He co-founded the California Art Club and was an active member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Wendt’s work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Diego Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Laguna Art Museum, California. Max Weyl (1837–1914) Max Weyl was born in Mühlen-am-Neckar, Germany, apprenticed with a watchmaker, and immigrated to the United States in 1853, working as an itinerant watch and clock repairman. In 1861 he opened a jewelry store in Washington, D.C., and began to paint on the side. After gaining recognition for his paintings in the 1870s, he toured Europe in 1878 and established a Washington studio on his return. He was an active and well-liked member of the Washington art world, and also summered in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Weyl’s work can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Smithsonian American Art Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910) Born near Springfield, Ohio, Thomas Worthington Whittredge trained as a house and sign painter in Cincinnati and exhibited his first landscapes there in 1839. He traveled to Europe in 1849, visiting England, France, and Belgium before settling in Düsseldorf, Germany. After living in Rome with Albert Bierstadt and Sanford R. Gifford from 1857 to 1859, Whittredge returned to the United States and rented a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. He was elected a National Academician in 1861 and served as president from 1874 to 1877. In 1880 he built a house called Hillcrest in Summit, New Jersey, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Whittredge’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Worcester Museum of Art, Massachusetts; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; and the Denver Art Museum. Guy C. Wiggins (1883–1962) The son of the landscape painter Carleton Wiggins, Guy Carleton Wiggins was born in Brooklyn, New York, and made his first artistic efforts on family trips to St. Ives, Cornwall, and France. He studied architecture and drafting at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn and then painting at the National Academy of Design. He found early recognition for his New York street scenes. He returned to St. Ives in 1914 and visited the Rocky Mountains in 1925. In 1920 Wiggins bought a farm near the Old Lyme artists’ colony, where he spent summers and later established the Guy Wiggins Art School. Wiggins’ work can be found in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alexander H. Wyant (1836–1892) Alexander Helwig Wyant was born in Port Washington or Evans Creek, Ohio. He established himself as an artist in Cincinnati from 1857 to 1863 and in New York from 1863 to 1865. After training with Hans Friedrich Gude in Karlsruhe, Germany, and visiting England and Ireland, he returned to New York and enjoyed a successful career as a landscape painter. In 1873 Wyant suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side, but he soon taught himself to paint with his left hand. After 1880 he spent much of his time in Keene Valley in the Adirondacks and, after 1889, in the Catskills at Arkville, New York. Wyant’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Cincinnati Art Museum; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Fine Art Frames

is a complete, full-service framing operation that specializes in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century frames. With a comprehensive collection of over five hundred antique frames in styles ranging from Louis XIV to Hudson River School and from Whistler to Stanford White, Fine Art Frames is able to provide you with the perfect frame of the correct period and style for your painting. Fine Art Frames also offers a large selection of historically accurate reproduction frames, which are handcrafted by master craftsmen and gilders using traditional techniques and materials, and which can be made to fit any painting. In addition to antique and reproduction frames, Fine Art Frames carries frames appropriate for contemporary paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. Fine Art Frames offers you the highest quality service at the lowest possible price, from reframing or restoring existing frames to creating accurate reproduction frames for your collection. Whether you are a private collector or gallery owner, Fine Art Frames is able to satisfy all of your framing needs. For more information, accurate price quotes, or to schedule a consultation, please call Nino DeLeon at (212) 288-0058 or visit www.fineartframes.com.

Fine Art Frames

Index

Avery, Milton

Payne, Edgar

Barlow, Myron G.

Peale, Rembrandt

Benson, Frank W.

Platt, George W.

Buttersworth, James E.

Pleissner, Ogden M.

Carlin, John

Potthast, Edward

Coffin, William A.

Prendergast, Maurice

Cornoyer, Paul

Ripley, Aiden Lassell

Cowell, William W.

Roesen, Severin

Doughty, Thomas

22, 42

Salmon, Robert

Grover, Oliver D.

Shahn, Ben

Guy, Seymour

Silva, Francis A.

Gwathmey, Robert

Smith, Thomas Lochlan

Hall, George Henry

Sonntag, William Louis

Harvey, George

Tarbell, Edmund C.

Hill, John William

Thompson, Jerome

Jones, Francis Coates

Wendt, William

Lambdin, George Cochran 18

Weyl, Max

Marin, John

Whittredge, Worthington

Marsh, Reginald

Wiggins, Guy C.

Millar, Addison T.

Wyant, Alexander H.

Palmer, Walter Launt

70 24, 26 8 72 78, 80

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