Figurative

Will Hicok Low (1853-1932) American

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 26” x 20”
Frame Size: 30.5” x 24.5”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $9500

Biography/Statement

Will Hicok Low, born in Albany, New York, in 1853, was a leading muralist and figurative painter who explored both Barbizon landscape and a colorful Victorian style. He studied with academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome from 1872-1877, in Paris, France. He was the second husband of artist Mary MacMonnies Low, and a friend of writer Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, New York City, elected an Associate in 1888, and an Academician in 1890. He exhibited at the National Academy for 60 years.

In March 1901, Will Low wrote an article for International Quarterly, “National Expression in American Art,” in which, defending the achievements of American painters of the day versus the Europeans, he sought to tie American art to the great traditions of the past, that were being carried forward in the America of his day. American artists were “another link in the long chain which brings from Greece through Italy and France to the shore of our western hemisphere.” He also wrote art criticism for Scribner’s, McClure’s and Century.

Low is represented in the collection of the National Academy by a drawing, in graphite, black ink, charcoal, and watercolor, of a Greek muse for the cover of the Academy’s Sixty Sixth Annual Exhibition in 1891. He also painted figurative panels on a 19th Century cabinet in the collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia.

Will Hicok Low died in Bronxville, New York in 1932.

Artist Profile Page: Low, Will Hicok / Categories: Figurative

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Figurative

Karl Rudolf Sohn (1845-1908) German/American

Little Green Friend

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 30.5” x 22”
Frame Size: 39.5” x 32”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $28000

Biography/Statement

Karl Friedrich Rudolf Sohn (1845 – 1908) was active/lived in Pennsylvania / Germany. Karl Sohn is known for Academic style portrait history and figure painting, teaching.

His father was the landscape painter, Karl Ferdinand Sohn. After graduating from the Königliches Gymnasium [de], he was drafted for military service, but was rejected for “physical weaknesses.” In 1863, he began studying engineering at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe. He completed his studies in 1866, but never practiced as an engineer. He returned to Düsseldorf and, shortly before his father’s death, he began to study art with him.

From 1867 to 1870, he was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied history painting with Karl Müller and figure painting with Julius Roeting. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he volunteered for a Hussar regiment, but was placed on reserve. It was then he began private studies with his cousin, Wilhelm Sohn, which eventually determined his choice to be a portrait painter.

In 1873, he married Else Sohn-Rethel in Dresden, the daughter of the painter Alfred Rethel. She would later become a well-known artist in her own right, as well as a popular singer. After the honeymoon, he established a permanent studio in Düsseldorf. He exhibited locally and sold his works in Paris through Goupil & Cie. The following year, he became a lecturer at the Kunstakademie. Within a few years, he was able to afford a larger home and studio.

His reputation as a portrait painter spread internationally. From 1882 to 1886, he was summoned to England by Queen Victoria, where he painted her portrait as well as those of Prince Leopold, Princess Beatrice, John Brown (the Queen’s servant), and others. She sat only once, to have him sketch her face, then other court ladies sat for him to fill in the details of clothing.

In 1888, he was appointed a juror for the Third International Art Exposition at the Glaspalast in Munich; together with his friends Robert Diez, Fritz Schaper and others. He travelled throughout Italy and France and became an early member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (Association of German Artists), participating in their exhibition of 1906.

A year after his death, the city of Düsseldorf hosted a memorial exhibition.

Personal life

His sons, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Otto Sohn-Rethel and Karli Sohn-Rethel all became well-known painters, and his daughter Mira Sohn-Rethel Heuser married painter Werner Heuser. His brother, Richard Sohn, was also an artist of some note.

Artist Profile Page: Sohn, Karl Rudolf / Categories: Figurative

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Figurative, Illustration

Barbara Spurr (1888-1963) English

Medium: Watercolor on paper
Image Size: 13.5” x 9”
Frame Size: 23” x 17.5”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $2800

Biography/Statement

BARBARA SPURR (August 6, 1888 – March 4, 1963)
Artist and painter in watercolor. Barbara Spurr was a prolific illustrator of children’s books from the 1920s through the 1940s. Though she is often mistaken as being an American artist, she was in fact British.

Barbara Spurr was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, the daughter of Ethel Mary Cropper (1858 – 1934) and George Edmondson Spurr (1858 – 1933). Her father was a milliner, dressmaker, draper and clothier based in Hitchin.

She attended the Royal Academy School in London, where she received her certificate in 1910, and the following year was still listed in the census as an art student. In 1914 her watercolor painting The Dream of Che-Yin was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, where it was noted as being admirable alongside works by several other women artists. Sadly, shortly thereafter three of her younger brothers were killed during World War I (1914 – 1918).

By the 1930s, Spurr had become one of the principal illustrators working for the publisher Renwick of Otley in Great Britain. As their books were often reissued with different covers and illustrations, it is hard to provide exact dates for the examples that were originally illustrated by Spurr. Among the books she appears to have either partially or fully illustrated are the following: The Lovesome Book for Little Folk (The Epworth Press, 1920s); Our Kiddie’s Fairystar (Renwick, c. 1929); Our Girls’ Tip Top (Renwick, c. 1930); Our Boys’ Best of All (Renwick, c. 1930); Tales of Adventure (Renwick, c. 1931); Our Girls’ Brightest (Renwick, c. 1936); Adventure (u.d.); Away We Go (u.d.); Country Days (u.d.); Growing Up (u.d.); Our Treasures (u.d.); Play With Us (u.d.); The Magic Flame (u.d.).

By 1939 Spurr was residing at 25 Field Lane, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England where she was listed as an artist and painter working on her own account. Later in her life she moved back closer to her hometown of Hitchin, settling, by 1960, in the nearby hamlet of Gosmore.

Barbara Spurr died at 2 High Street, Gosmore, Hertfordshire, England on Wednesday, the 6th of March 1963 at the age of seventy-four years. It is presently unclear from where her services were held or where she was eventually buried. Based on the value of her estate – which totaled nearly $15,000 pounds – she appears to have been successful at her chosen profession.

As an artist, she was known for her watercolor paintings, and designed both covers and interior illustrations for the books she worked on. Usually, her illustration paintings are signed “B. Spurr” at the lower left or lower right of the work.

Though there are undoubtedly other exhibitions in which Spurr participated, those presently known include the following: The Royal Academy, London, England, (1914). Her works are not known to be in the collection of any public institutions but do reside in many private collections throughout the World.

Artist Profile Page: Spurr, Barbara / Categories: Figurative, Illustration

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Figurative

Robert Philipp (1895-1981) American

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 29” x 36”
Frame Size: 37” x 44”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $3800

Biography/Statement

Robert Philipp was born Moses Solomon Philipp on February 2, 1895 in New York City. He showed early talent and grew up in a family atmosphere that fed and cultivated his creativity. At age of 15, he entered the Art Students League for four years and then continued his training at the National Academy of Design. His teachers at the League included George Bridgeman and Frank DuMond, and at the National Academy he studied with Douglas Volk and George Willoughby Maynard.

Recognition cam quickly to Philipp, and his early works exhibit an eclectic range of artistic sources: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Renoir, Bonnard, Sargent and Fantin-Latour. After the death of his father, Philipp turned away from painting for a time and joined his uncle’s opera company as a tenor. He eventually returned to painting and settled in Paris, living there in the 1920s. The exact date of Paris sojourn is not known, but he reportedly lived there for ten years, supporting himself through the sale of his paintings.

Back in New York in the early 1930s, Philipp was gaining a reputation for his portraits and figure studies. His – Olympia – won the Logan prize at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936 and was subsequently purchase by J. Paul Getty. During the Depression, he worked for the Public Works of Arts Project.

In 1934, he married artist Shelly (Rochelle) Post, who became his favorite model until her death in 1971. Critic Henry McBride called Philipp “One of the top ten painters in America.” It was during the 1930s that he began to paint landscapes, still lives and nudes evolving a distinctively lyric and modern style.

Philipp painted passionately and directly creating a synthesis of observation and poetic vision using high keyed colors and rhythmic treatment of form. Philipp’s work, in his later years, began to increasingly resemble the Expressionist and emotional style of Chaim Soutine.

Philipp, as a teacher at the Art Students League for over thirty years and at the National Academy for sixteen years, was an important influence on American art. As a teacher, he was well known for his attention to color and his constant emphasis on the importance of drawing. He was a member of the Lotus Club, National Academy of Design and Royal Society of Arts.

His works are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; Dallas Museum, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.

Artist Profile Page: Philipp, Robert / Categories: Figurative

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Figurative

Robert Brackman (1898-1980)

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 42” x 32”
Frame Size: 52” x 42”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $18000

Biography/Statement

Best known for large figural works, portraits, and still lifes in realist style with interplay of design elements, Robert Brackman created paintings that show the gamut of technical and imaginative skills. It is not credible to align him with any art movement because he was an artist who simply went his own way, pursuing his own vision.

From 1931, he had a long career teaching at the Art Students League in New York and was a life member of the League. He also taught at the American Art School in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum School, the Lyme Art Academy, and the Madison Art School in Connecticut.

As a portraitist, he painted notables including John D Rockefeller, Jr., Charles Lindburgh, and John Foster Dulles as well as portraits commissioned by the Air Force Academy and the State Department. He was so successful with his portrait painting that he had to choose amongst persons wanting to commission him and from 1940, limited his sitters to three or four a year.

He was born in Odessa, Russia, and came to the United States in 1908. He studied at The National Academy of Design from 1919 to 1921, and the Ferrer School in San Francisco. In New York, he also studied with Robert Henri and George Bellows at the National Academy of Design.

From 1934 to 1944, he had seven one-man exhibitions in New York City at Macbeth Gallery.

Artist Profile Page: Brackman, Robert / Categories: Figurative

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Figurative

Ethelwyn B Upton (1871-1920)

The figure appears in a major Leon L'Hermitte painting in the Metropolitan Museum in New York

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 30” x 36”
Frame Size: 40” x 46”
Signature: Signed and dated 1889 lower right
Price: SOLD

Biography/Statement

ETHELWYN B. UPTON (August 1871 – November 22, 1920)

Landscape and figure painter in oil and watercolor, teacher. Born in Flushing, Queens County Long Island, the daughter of Bertha Hudson (1848 – 1912) and Thomas Harborough Upton (1841 – 1889). Her father was employed as a confidential clerk for over twenty years with the American Exchange National Bank and the family resided in the Whitestone and later Bayside parts of Queens, Long Island.

The family was left nearly destitute by the sudden and early death of Thomas Upton. Like their father, who was an enthusiastic amateur artist, the Upton children gravitated towards the arts, and all of them would enter the field. Ethelwyn and her two sisters, Alice Upton (1875 – 1951) and Florence Kate Upton (1873 – 1922) – who along with her mother became widely celebrated for the “Golliwog” series of children’s books – were all successful artists in the early 20 th century, while the only son, Desmond (1880 – 1959) became an architect.

Ethelwyn Upton attended the Women’s Art School at Cooper Union and possibly the school associated with the National Academy or the Art Students League (where her sister Florence studied), all located in New York City. In 1893 her works and those of several of her fellow students at Cooper Union were selected for exhibition at the O’Brien Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana. This was followed later that year by the inclusion of her work at the Word’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. In December of 1897 she showed her work at the women’s art exhibition held at the Van Dyck Studio Clubroom on 56 th Street in Manhattan. This show was exclusively organized by and for women artists working in the Van Dyck studios.

Between 1900 and 1910 she traveled to Europe regularly, probably to study art, but definitely to visit with her sister Florence who had since relocated to London, returning to New York in the autumn of 1906 aboard the Teutonic. She traveled again to Great Britain a few years later,returning aboard the New York in the late summer of 1910. It is possible, as was noted by Florence’s biographer, that during the family’s time in Paris “… [like their sister Florence] … it is highly probable that both Alice and Ethelwyn also took art  courses while they were in France.” Among the many places Ethelwyn visited in Europe with her sisters was the Franz Hals Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands.

By 1908, Upton’s works were being exhibited alongside a number of important American artists, such as Childe Hassam (1859 – 1935) and Robert Henri (1865 – 1929), at the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts exhibition in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That same year she was included in the “Exhibition of Paintings by Women Artists” held at the prestigious Knoedler’s Galleries in New York City (where she exhibited her work, “The Shadow”). A few years later, in 1909, her work was included at the exhibition of the Woman’s Art Club of New York. By 1912 she had joined the faculty of the Garden City Conservatory of Music and Arts, a music and art school organized by Countess Constance Boggs le Tourneux (a.k.a. Mrs. Lewis Dunham Boggs), located in Garden City, Long Island. The school never took off, and Upton returned to her work as a private artist in New York City.

Joining many other Brooklynites, in 1917 she vacationed at Lake Raquette, located in the Adirondacks of New York State. Beginning in the late 19 th century, “Raquette Lake developed into one of the most prestigious summer getaways for the elite…,” and came to serve as the “midpoint to other Gilded Age retreats such as the Great Camps Sagamore (1897), Camp Uncas (1890), and Kamp Kill Kare (1896) on nearby lakes Sagamore, Mohegan, and Kora, respectively.”

Ethelwyn B. Upton died in Manhattan after a bout with nephritis on Monday, the 22 nd of November 1920 (the year is often erroneously reported as 1921 or 1922) at the age of forty-nine years. Her funeral service was organized form the chapel of St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan on November 26 th with interment following in the family plot at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. At the time of her death, Upton was in a relationship with Bessie L. Gaylord, a college secretary, with whom she resided on West 119 th Street in Manhattan.

Upton was a Companion of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross (SCHS), which according to Julia M. Allen’s book Passionate Commitments (2013) was “an Episcopal laywomen’s’ organization …devoted to intercessory prayer, thanksgiving and simplicity of life…the Companions were… a new form of social organization, devised by women, one that fostered the independence of members, independence especially from the traditional family structure in which women were wards of men, first of their fathers and then their husbands – and where a daughter’s lack of a husband by a certain age was sure to constitute a family crisis.” The SCHS became a place where like-minded single women of all backgrounds could meet, work and socialize and have the type of companionship beyond that normally found out in the world.

Some members of the SCHS would later organize the Church League for Industrial Democracy (CLID), which professed a new definition of love, “not meant to be simply a two-way street between God and individual humans but a multidirectional network, extending throughout humanity…” In theory, this new meaning of love could between man and woman, man and man or woman and woman, a change which was “profound and far-reaching.” Sometimes called “Homogenic Love,” it was about “same-sex devotion” not for necessarily for personal gratification, but for bettering society, which in turn led to close spiritual friendships and partnerships that were rarely “attempts at emulating heterosexual relationships.” At the turn of the twentieth century this led to a specific culture, “a culture that celebrated the social value of same-sex love and reversed the social condemnation traditionally accorded ‘spinsters.’” This type of relationship was made evident and confirmed when Ethelwyn Upton died in 1920 and the Companions not only “expressed ‘its sympathy with Miss Gaylord’” but also “with Upton’s relatives” as well.

The few works by Upton that have appeared on the market are often impressionist in nature, with some works done in a style popular with Victorian collectors and households. In addition to landscapes and townscapes, she painted floral still-lifes and Dutch interiors. She most often signed her name fully, “Ethelwyn B. Upton.” Upton was a member of the National Association of  Women Painters & Sculptors.

Though there are undoubtedly other exhibitions in which Upton participated, those presently known include the following: O’Brien Gallery, New Orleans, LA, 1893; World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL, 1893; National Academy of Design, New York, NY, 1907; Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, Minneapolis, MN, 1908; Knoedler’s Galleries, New York, NY, 1908; Woman’s Art Club, New York, NY, 1909; National Association of Women Painters & Sculptors, New York, NY, 1914.

 

This following biography was researched, compiled, and written by Geoffrey K. Fleming, Executive Director, Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV.

Artist Profile Page: Upton, Ethelwyn B. / Categories: Figurative

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Figurative

Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910)

Two Children and a Bird, dated 1877

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 54” x 42”
Frame Size: 70” x 58”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $65000

Biography/Statement

Seymour Joseph Guy established a reputation in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century as one of the finest genre painters of children. His primarily cabinet-sized pictures were esteemed by his fellow artists and leading collectors of American art. He was widely respected for his technical ability and knowledge of the science of painting, but with the emergence of a younger generation of European-trained artists in the 1880s, Guy’s meticulous and smoothly polished scenes of childhood began to fall out of fashion. In recent decades his art and talent have been reappraised by museums, scholars, and collectors of early American art, but up to now almost nothing has been published about his life and career.

Guy was born and raised in Greenwich, England, a parliamentary borough of London. He was the son of Jane Delver Wilson and Frederick Bennett Guy (d. 1833), and he had two brothers, Frederick Bennett Guy Jr. (1823-1899) and Charles Henry Guy (1824-1861). Following their mother’s death, probably in the late 1820s, the children were raised by their father, an innkeeper and owner of various commercial properties. Upon Frederick’s death in July 1833, the siblings appear to have been raised under the guardianship of John Locke, the proprietor of the Spanish Galleon, a tavern that still stands on Church Street in Greenwich, or John Hughes, a Church Street cheese merchant.

Growing up, Guy attended a day school in Surrey. He developed an early interest in art, and was fond of painting dogs and horses. At the age of thirteen he expressed a serious desire to become either an artist or a civil engineer. His guardian responded by taking away his pocket money in hopes of motivating him to make a different career choice. Undaunted, Guy took up sign painting and earned enough money to buy the supplies he needed to continue his art education. For a brief period in the later 1830s he studied with a marine painter named Butterworth or Buttersworth—probably Thomas Buttersworth (1768-1842), who was a resident of Greenwich and had a successful career as a painter of ships and coastal scenes.

About 1839 Guy’s guardian convinced him to seek training as an engraver, but the expense of placing him as an apprentice with an engraving firm proved prohibitive. Instead Guy began a seven year apprenticeship in the oil and color trade, which entailed making pigments and preparing binders, as well as combining those ingredients to make paint either by hand-grinding or working a steam driven machine. The experience led Guy to grind and mix pigments for his own work.

Frederick Bennett Guy had stipulated in his will that his estate be divided among his children when Charles reached the age of twenty-one. This occurred about 1845, and closely coincided with the conclusion of Seymour’s apprenticeship and the death of his guardian, providing him with the freedom and means to pursue an artistic career. An influential friend by the name of Müller asked him if he wanted to study at the Royal Academy in London, but Guy preferred to study on his own at the British Museum. The next day Müller provided him with the necessary permit to set up his easel and copy paintings in the galleries, an opportunity Guy would later recall with great gratitude.

Guy decided to supplement his experience at the museum by joining the studio of the painter Ambrosini Jerôme (1810-1883). For a period of probably four years, he spent four days a week on his own and three days with Jerôme, who worked as a portrait, mythological, historical, and genre painter, and in the mid-1840s served as portrait painter to Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1786-1861), the Duchess of Kent and mother of Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901). Under Jerôme’s tutelage, Guy focused on whatever brought in money—portraiture, designs for naval basins, “effects” for architects, and plans for ships in isometrical perspective. Guy had probably accrued knowledge of naval vessels while studying under Buttersworth, who had served in the Royal Navy.

In 1851 Guy exhibited Cupid in Search of Psyche (whereabouts unknown) at the British Institution. A small related version or sketch for the picture shows Cupid sitting on a shell that is propelled by a sail. The picture foreshadows Guy’s later interest in depicting children, as well as his occasional enthusiasm for mythological and nude subjects. According to the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, before leaving England, Guy painted “many copies of old masters and painted portraits with much success in London.” In 1852 he married Anna Maria Barber (c. 1832-1907), daughter of William Barber, an engraver. The couple had nine children who undoubtedly served as models for their father.

In 1854 Guy and his family immigrated to New York, settling in Brooklyn. He briefly became a prominent figure in the art life of the city. For several years he had a studio in the Dodworth Building on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, which housed the studios of a number of the city’s leading artists. In 1857 he became a founding member of the Sketch Club there, and at that time may have first come into contact with the English-born genre painter John George Brown (1831-1913), with whom he would form a close friendship.

For many years the two were virtually inseparable. Guy and Brown were probably initially drawn together by their English background and training and their shared penchant for minute workmanship and careful finish. During their years together in Brooklyn, Guy and Brown gravitated toward artists and collectors of British heritage. They formed close friendships with the Scottish-born collector and amateur artist John M. Falconer (1820-1903) and the English-born collector and restaurateur John Campion Force (1810-1875). During this period Guy painted several portraits, including one in 1859 of Benjamin G. Edmonds (1821-1895) (New-York Historical Society, New York), Captain of the Thirteenth Regiment of the New York State Militia headquartered in Brooklyn, which he considered to be among his finest.

In 1861 Guy and Brown headed across the East River to the artistic shores of Manhattan. Guy took a studio at the other Dodworth Building on Broadway, and Brown moved into the Tenth Street Studio Building. In 1863 Guy followed Brown into the now legendary three-story brick structure, which opened in 1857 and over the course of the next decade became the bastion of the American artistic establishment.

Among the many prominent artists to reside there during the course of Guy’s forty-seven year occupancy were Sanford Robinson Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, and William Merritt Chase.

Guy began to paint genre scenes of children about 1861, taking his cue from Brown, who started to picture children in rustic country settings by 1859. It is likely that the two artists made frequent visits together to Fort Lee, New Jersey, in the early 1860s, and that it was while there that Guy’s art moved in this new direction. Fort Lee, which was quickly and easily reachable by ferry, remained an agrarian outpost of New York City until the 1920s. Brown settled in the town in 1864, and Guy and his family moved there from Brooklyn two years later. In 1873 Guy and his family returned to New York, where he remained for the rest of his life, inhabiting a series of different residences in the vicinity of East 120th Street in Manhattan.

The majority of Guy’s genre scenes from 1861 to 1866 feature children playing in a country setting in summertime. A typical example is Open Your Mouth and Shut Your Eyes, which is probably the work exhibited under the title Close Your Eyes at the Artists’ Fund Society in New York in late 1863. Several of Guy’s pictures of the period center on the interaction of a brother and sister, in which the sister is portrayed in the act of garnering her brother’s attention. As is typical of his genre paintings, the surface of the picture is marked by a smooth, glossy, enamel-like surface. Colors are carefully blended and fused, and brushstrokes are invisible. Guy’s early genre scenes typically include a picket fence, which spans the width of the background and creates a physical enclosure, which helps to convey a sense of intimacy, safety, and distance from the regular cares of the world. Also, small objects or pieces of furniture frequently appear in the right foreground of his scenes, which help to lead the viewer into the composition.

About 1866 Guy developed a greater interest in creating interior genre scenes. His first major attempt to combine portraiture and genre painting was his 1866 work The Contest for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in Their New York Dining-Room. The Scottish-born Gordon (1829-1918) was a founding member and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and had previously acquired Guy’s genre scene Love Launched a Ferry Boat (c. 1863, whereabouts unknown). The Contest for the Bouquet features the dining room of the Gordons’ house on West Thirty-third Street. Their extensive art collection, consisting mainly of American landscapes, is tiered on the walls of the elegantly appointed room. The vivid blue draperies and dress of the older daughter and the bright red leggings of the younger son add brilliant touches of color to the otherwise subdued tones.

The setting for the picture provided Guy with a rare opportunity to completely articulate a large interior space, and he masterfully handled the rendering of the room’s perspective. During his lifetime he was highly regarded for his knowledge of perspective, and was sometimes called upon by colleagues seeking help with their compositions. In 1885 a writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle remarked that Guy was “deeply versed not only in the mechanism of painting, but in perspective, and has made some valuable observations in the measurement of distant objects and the effect of distance on color and light.” It was also reported that Guy “can analyze a composition, scale its merits and defects and reveal its hidden curves and lines as accurately as the chemist analyzes a drug.”

The primary focus of The Contest for the Bouquet is on the three children standing in the left foreground, two of whom playfully attempt to grab the bouquet from the outstretched hand of their older brother, whose other hand firmly holds onto his school books. Guy’s genre paintings regularly feature books that are either held in a child’s hand or that have been momentarily put aside because of an interruption or distraction. A number of pictures also center on mothers reading to their children. The three children are probably angling to see which one of them will have the honor of presenting the floral bouquet to their mother, who looks on calmly from her chair while holding her youngest daughter. Interestingly, the arrangement of figures brings to mind Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii of 1784 (Musée du Louvre, Paris). In addition to combining portraiture and genre, Guy appears to be slyly alluding to French neoclassical history painting, an unexpected source for such a playful family scene.

In October 1867 Guy followed up The Contest for the Bouquet with his painting Evening, which was commissioned by John M. Falconer and features a portrait of his mother, Catherine Stewart Falconer, seated in the picture-lined parlor of John’s Brooklyn house. Evening is one of a series of pictures that Guy painted between 1867 and 1873 that feature an interior bathed in the light of an oil lamp, gaslight, or candle.

In 1873 Guy received the most important and controversial commission of his career, a portrait of William Henry Vanderbilt and his family posed in the drawing room of their home at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street in New York. Vanderbilt had become fond of Guy during the course of his frequent visits to the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he acquired genre paintings by Guy, Brown, and other artist tenants. Apparently he presented Guy with the grouping, idea, and motif for the work, which features him and his wife surrounded by their children, who are about to step out for a night at the opera. Vanderbilt may have conceived this combination of portraiture and genre after seeing Guy’s painting of the Gordon family. In the early 1870s Vanderbilt was not well known to the public, having yet to emerge from the large shadow of his father “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), then considered the wealthiest man in the country.

Going to the Opera was displayed at the 1874 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, where it attracted great crowds because of its representation of members of such a prominent family, but received a generally poor reception from the art critics. Guy escaped blame for what the critics saw as deficiencies in the painting’s setting and subject, which they felt he had been obligated by his patron to represent. Several mentioned that the room was simply too small to gracefully contain such a large group of figures. The critic for the Nation also thought that the room was poorly decorated, and criticized “the complete want of individuality in the furniture, the expressionlessness of every inch of background, the machine made look of the carvings, the iron oppressiveness of the black arched molding, completely at war with the wall decoration, etc.” Another writer criticized the room’s color, noting that the “dull buff brown of the walls, lit up by the yellow light of the gas, too nearly coincides with the gilding on the frames, and not even the mat of black which encircles the picture can break the continuity.” The critic for the New York Evening Express felt impelled to mention Guy’s picture in the context of commenting that family groups “on canvas are abominations at the best, but when the figures are dressed up in spic-and-span new clothes, and introduced much after the manner of a fashion-plate they become doubly offensive.”

In 1876 the artist and journalist Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815-1878) published an article about Guy and his work in Baldwin’s Monthly. It includes a strong defense of Going to the Opera and was likely fueled by Guy’s own feelings about the attacks and the merits of his canvas, for the two were friends. Thorpe wrote that the critics had generally missed the work’s higher aim as a work of art, and that this had resulted in a great loss of opportunity for American art. Thorpe believed that had the exalted notion of domestic affection that prompted the creation of this picture been properly, considerably treated by the “art critics,” there is no doubt but that the fashion of having portraiture combined with the charms of genre pictures, would have been established…. It would fill our parlors with exquisite works of art, and preserve the exact likeness of face and dress of our handsome, unsurpassed women, as they appear in the era of representation, giving these pictures in time, not only the highest value as works of art, but also a most pleasing historical importance.

Following the exhibition of Going to the Opera, Guy devoted most of his attention for the next decade to creating generally small domestic genre scenes, such as Up for Repairs  and Temptation. He never again created a work on the scale and ambition of the Vanderbilt picture.

During the 1880s he returned to creating portraits on a regular basis and also developed an interest in painting ideal heads, sometimes portraying a woman in a picturesque setting or out being entertained. In his later works he continued to paint slowly and deliberately, to employ a careful glazing technique, and to prefer a smooth lacquered surface. From about 1874 onward there was growing criticism of Guy’s paintings for their polished technique and lack in variety of texture.

The important writer and historian of American art Samuel G. W. Benjamin (1837-1914), for example, felt that his works were overly elaborate in technique and that this robbed them of “freshness and piquancy.” Guy also had his defenders, such as the art writer and curator Sylvester R. Koehler (1837-1900), who in 1886 noted that “Guy values elegance and finish more than the facility which is the charm of much of the work now current, he has frequently, and most unjustly, been assailed of late,—even while the same qualities in [contemporary] French painters were reckoned of value, and his deeper qualities have been overlooked.”

By the time of his death in 1910, Guy was almost completely forgotten as an artist. During the last decade of his life he seems to have served as something of an elder statesman to younger artists interested in increasing their knowledge about the art and craft of painting. The lengthiest eulogy for Guy appeared in the Century Association’s annual publication dealing with club affairs, where it was related that Guy is remembered with deep affection by artists who came to him as to an older man of recognized position. He was most genial, cordial, and ready to place himself and the methods of his art at their disposal, rejoicing in their companionship and keeping himself young through participation in their pursuits. For twenty-two years he was of the rare artistic fellowship of The Century, though of late years, through the infirmities of age, seldom here.

Today it is time to linger again before Guy’s canvases and appreciate their special beauty, charm, and technical virtuosity.

Artist Profile Page: Guy, Seymour Joseph / Categories: Figurative

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Figurative, Portrait

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1857-1937) American

Pomp The Lion in the Philly Zoo. Attributed to Henry Ossawa Tanner

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 24” x 20”
Frame Size: 35” x 31”
Price: $24000
*Attributed to / Not signed (or copy of orig. work)

Biography/Statement

America’s first internationally renowned African-American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh to a well-educated and devoutly religious family.  When Henry was age 13, his father, the Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner, moved the family to Philadelphia.

With the support of his parents and inspiration from the art of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy to study with Thomas Eakins who became a close friend.
Tanner briefly painted animals and was determined to become the “American Landseer” in response to the demand for animal portraits.  Between 1886 and 1887 Tanner was an illustrator for Harper Brothers, a publishing firm willing to advance black artists and writers.

He then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he briefly and unsuccessfully ran a photography studio, but by 1891 he turned back to painting and sailed for France.
In Paris he studied at the Julian Academy with Benjamin Constant and J.P. Laurens.  He received many honors and was considered a ‘strong man’ at Julian’s before his first Salon picture.  He traveled to celebrated locations as Pont-Aven, but remained relatively unswayed by contemporary art movements.  Tanner discovered the Salons and their power to advance a painter’s career, both abroad and in America.

The acceptance of his painting, The Banjo Lesson by the 1894 Salon marked both a “turning point in his career and a shift in emphasis in his choice of subject, for it was his first major exploration of the pathos of the black in society.”
He returned briefly to Philadelphia but decided Paris was his natural home.  At first, he was highly successful with genre painting but switched to religious subjects in the mid-1890’s and traveled extensively in the Near East to absorb Biblical references.

In 1899, Tanner married Jessie Macauley Olssen, a white Californian, and decided to make France his home for the remainder of his life.  He feared that Americans would not be accepting of an interracial marriage.

In 1908, he wrote of France, “There is a breadth, a generosity, an obsolete cosmopolitanism about her recognition of the fine arts, which bars no nationality, no race, no school, or variation of artistic method.”

Sources include:
Antiques Magazine
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art

Artist Profile Page: Tanner, Henry Ossawa / Categories: Figurative, Portrait

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Figurative, Illustration

Albert Herter (1871-1950) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas/Board
Image Size: 20” x 14”
Frame Size: 28” x 22”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $12500

Biography/Statement

Albert Herter is best remembered in East Hampton, New York for two reasons: as the original owner of the Creeks, the extravagant 60-acre estate on Georgica Pond, later the home of the painter Alfonso Ossorio and the dancer Ted Dragon and now owned by Ronald Perelman; and as the father of Christian Herter, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second Secretary of State.  Some might say he should be better known as an artist, for before his death in 1950, he was celebrated for his historical murals.

But time has not been kind to the Maxfield Parrish or N.C. Wyeth style that to some extent Albert Herter often emulated, probably because these painters are thought of as mere illustrators rather than true artists.  Time has its benign side as well, for nostalgia seems to envelop everything remotely interesting from the past these days, and Albert Herter is no exception.

In a new, slim volume of stories, A Dubious Lineage, the Herter family has for the first time published some reminiscences Mr. Herter wrote of his childhood and marriage and about painting, including a family genealogy as well as a beautifully written postface by Patsy Southgate.

An Artistic Family:
While the publication of these stories is not a major literary event, they do have a certain charm, especially for East Hamptoners who have an interest in the town’s cultural history. Albert Herter was the son of Christian Herter, an important interior designer and cabinetmaker whose elaborate work can still be seen in the Morgan Library and the Metropolitan Museum.  Mr. Herter, born in 1871, grew up in a home devoted to the arts.  Although his father was an extremely successful furniture designer, his secret ambition was to become a painter, and 10 years after his son’s birth, he gave up his career in New York, where he was known as “society’s darling as well as its decorator,” to move to Paris to study painting.

As a student in Paris, Mr. Herter met Adele McGinnis, the daughter of a prominent banker, whom he married soon after.  They traveled to Japan for their honeymoon where they spent much of their time painting.  The life they had settled on for themselves, to become artists, was possible because of sizable inheritances from both their families.  The Herters were therefore able to devote their time to their work and soon, Mr. Herter became known as an important artist.

His two most famous works were both murals.  One, dedicated to the memory of his son who was killed during World War I, was painted for the Gare de l’Est in Paris. The second, inspired by his second son, Christian, later the Governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of State, hangs in the House of Representatives in Boston.

Herter also formed a company to design and manufacture tapestries, upholstery and curtains; as a result, Mr. Herter became both an artistic and a financial success. Much of the money he earned and inherited went into building the Creeks, designing its extensive gardens, installing many extravagances like a Venetian gondola on the pond, and generally leading life on a grand scale. The Herters were a sophisticated couple, traveling as widely as one could in the days before jet airplanes.  They lived in California much of the time, but came back most summers to East Hampton.

When Adele Herter died in 1946, Mr. Herter moved to the Algonquin Hotel, but continued to spend his winters in Santa Barbara and summers out east.  The commentary accompanying the stories suggests that his last years were spent with his companion Willy Stevens, who was responsible for saving the texts that have now finally been published.

Source:
Excerpted from a review by Richard Dunn of the book, Herter, A Dubious Lineage, organized by his family:

Artist Profile Page: Herter, Albert / Categories: Figurative, Illustration

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Figurative, Mod-Realist

(Unsigned) European

Likely Hungarian, painted in the Social Realism style, circa 1930

Medium: Oil on Wood Panel
Image Size: 24” x 16”

Price: SOLD

Biography/Statement

N/A

Artist Profile Page: Unsigned/No Artist Affiliation / Categories: Figurative, Mod-Realist

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