Hudson River School, Landscape

Charles Wilson Knapp (1823-1900) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 20” x 36”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $8500

Biography/Statement

Charles W. Knapp is well known for his quintessential depictions of farm life along the rivers and shorelines of America from New Hampshire to upper state New York. “View of the Susquehanna River” was painted between 1860-1870 in Pennsylvania farm country, where cattle drank along rivers and farmers piled hay on wagons to feed animals. This canvas is a major example painted during the peak of the Hudson River School tradition.

Knapp was born in Philadelphia in 1823 and he died in that city in 1900. He first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1859, at which time his address is listed as New York City. In 1878 he exhibited two New Hampshire views at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association in Boston, many views at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1877-1887) and most recently his canvases of Ellsworth Brook in West Campton, NH, the Entrance to Franconia Knotch, Silver Lake near Mount Chocorua, the Peabody River in Mount Washington, Saco and Kearsarge and the White Mountains from Androscoggin Valley were listed in New Hampshire Scenery (C.H. Campbell, NH Historical Society, Phoenix Publishing1985).

His paintings are in many relevant private collections and at the New Hampshire Historical Society, Dartmouth College Art Galleries and elsewhere. He is considered a leading White Mountains painter, but he spent many years in and around Philadelphia and the Susquehanna River painting landscapes from life. He also painted Narragansett Bay (RI), the Pocanos, the Catskills, the Delaware Water Gap and along the New Jersey Shore.

Artist Profile Page: Knapp, Charles Wilson / Categories: Hudson River School, Landscape

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Landscape, Marine / Seascape

Warren Sheppard (1858-1937) American

Seascape on wooden pallette

Medium: Oil on Wood Pallette
Image Size: 11” x 14”
Frame Size: 13” x 15”
Signature: Signed lower center
Price: $2800

Biography/Statement

A student of Dutch marine artist, Mauritz de Haas, Warren Sheppard built two successful careers around his love of the sea: marine painting and yacht designing.

He was born in Greenwich, New Jersey, a town on the Delaware River below Philadelphia, which has been associated with ships and shipping since the earliest Colonial times.  His father was a sea captain and the young Sheppard took many voyages with his father to make artistic studies.  He learned perspective drawing at Cooper Union in New York City in addition to his studies with de Haas.  In 1879, he spent four months sketching Mediterranean port cities including Gibraltar, Genoa, Naples and Messina in Sicily.  Between 1888 and 1893, he also studied painting in Venice and Paris.

By the time he was in his mid-thirties, he had established himself as a successful illustrator and painter.  The yachts he painted were the most lavish of his day, owned by the wealthiest of men.  He was an expert in the design and rigging of ships of present and earlier times.  His work was highly regarded for its authenticity as well as its artistic merit.

Sheppard was also an expert navigator and sailed a number of famous yachts in races.  Twice he was to command Tamerlane when it won the New York to Bermuda run.  His book, Practical Navigation, was used for many years by the United States Naval Academy.  Though he retired from the sea, Sheppard continued to paint until his death in Brooklyn, New York in 1937.

Exhibited:
Denver Exposition 1884-Gold medal
Chicago Exposition – 1892
St. Louis Exposition-1904
Brooklyn Allied Artists Group Shows – 1874-1881
National Academy of Design – 1880-1899

Collections:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, CT
Addison Gallery of American Art (MA)
Phillips Academy, Andover
Springfield Public Library

Artist Profile Page: Sheppard, Warren / Categories: Landscape, Marine / Seascape

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Hudson River School, Landscape, Luminist

Sean Witucki (N/A) Contemporary, American

Medium: Oil on Board
Image Size: 8” x 10”
Frame Size: 14” x 16”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $1800

Biography/Statement

Sean M. Witucki (b. 1977) obtained his BS and MS in Visual Art Education from the State University of NY at Buffalo State.  Sean is primarily a self-taught artist, who is always focused on developing his skills in the techniques of the traditional masters.  He has been a drawing and painting instructor at the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts since 2002.

Sean reveals a personal and contemporary expression of landscapes and still lives which pay homage to his formative years. He spent much of his boyhood roaming the fields and woods on the edge of the Berkshire Mountains in Monson, Massachusetts.  This is where his understanding of the natural world took its roots.  This influence plays a major role in the subjects of Sean’s works.

In 2016 Sean had the honor of becoming a Hudson River Fellow with the Grand Central Atelier.  This experience has greatly influenced his work.

Artist Profile Page: Witucki, Sean / Categories: Hudson River School, Landscape, Luminist

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Landscape, Marine / Seascape

Max Kuehne (1880-1968) American

Medium: Oil on Board
Image Size: 18” x 24”
Frame Size: 26” x 32”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $7500

Biography/Statement

Born in Halle, Germany in 1880, Max Kuehne was a colorist who created cheerful landscapes that appear to be painted spontaneously and with freshness.

He studied with William Merritt Chase and Kenneth Hayes at the Chase School in New York. In 1910, he embarked on a bicycling trip, traveling through England, France, Germany, Holland and Belgium. To support this trip he did portrait commissions along the way.

When he returned to New York City, he set up a studio in Greenwich Village and was a student of Robert Henri from whom he learned a dark impressionist style. He also became close with such avant garde artists as Guy Pene du Bois, William Glackens, William Zorach and Maurice and Charles Prendergast, which also influenced his dark work including street scenes and docks in New York City. However, three years in Spain, and painting trips to Gloucester lightened his palette as did time in Paris where he was much influenced by the Fauves, Nabis, and decorative painters. By 1912 he was producing work that would make him known as a “colourist of great distinction” by producing “paintings full of sparkling sunlight.”

He became a member of the artistic community later in Rockport, Massachusetts, with Gifford Beal, Leon Kroll, Paul Manship, Edward Hopper and Jonas Lie. Many of his finest paintings done later in his career are of the busy harbors and piers of Gloucester and Rockport.

His work was widely exhibited including the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

Artist Profile Page: Kuehne, Max / Categories: Landscape, Marine / Seascape

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Barbizon School, Landscape, Tonalism

Dennis Sheehan (1950-) Contemporary, American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Frame Size: 18” x 30”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $7500

Biography/Statement

Dennis Sheehan, born in Boston in 1950, is a member of the Guild of Boston Artists. His work is in major public and private collections., including the White House. Sheehan paints in the Barbizon mode with remarkable authority and faithful adherence to his 19th century precursors. In the tradition of the Tonalist painters, Sheehan creates landscapes of mood, affected by nature’s changing seasons.

“Today, in a cultural firmament that has been defined as Postmodern, a new generation of American painters is returning to the old landscape seeking a renewed vision.  The cultural strategies that they employ are as diverse as any from the past; in most cases, these painters consciously strive to enter into a dialogue with the history of the White Mountains art.  Their work, grounded in a sophisticated appreciation of what has come before, is in many cases deliberately discursive with a tradition that has been all but erased twice by historical and cultural forces.” 

The contemporary work of Dennis Sheehan, for example, affords a great nineteenth-century-predecessor George Inness.  Like Inness, whose influence is consciously acknowledged, Sheehan employs the dark palette and thickly pigmented surfaces of the French Barbizon School*. Maintaining a muted tonalist chromatic scheme, Sheehan, like Inness before him, has temerity to eschew picturesque scenery-his Conway Meadows avoids any reference to the traditional climax view of Mount Washington—in the interest of evoking atmospherics* and the appearance of the natural world as it is observed.

Optical truth combined with poetic resonance—the search for some ineffable quality of nature beyond words -constitutes the probity of his art. Yet, also like Inness, Sheehan’s paintings are produced in the studio. His work is the product of the conscious distillation of prior imagery ranging from the American Barbizon to the abstractions of Franz Kline. For all of the references to history—and there are multiple—there is no mistaking the artist’s debt to the more recent past. Without the legacy of action painting, Sheehan’s art would be less forceful and evocative than it is.”

Source: Guild of Boston Artists

 “My goal is to have the painting emanate light, rather than be just a surface that records the reflections of light. This is why the shadow areas are important, for it is from them that this emanation proceeds. The light areas are focal points of this effort, but the power comes from the shadows.” – Dennis Sheehan

Artist Profile Page: Sheehan, Dennis / Categories: Barbizon School, Landscape, Tonalism

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Landscape, Luminist, Still Life

John Williamson (1826-1885) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 27” x 20”
Frame Size: 35” x 28”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $7500

Biography/Statement

John Williamson was a versatile artist who created still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes during the heyday of the Hudson River School. Born in Scotland, Williamson came to the United States with his family in 1831. He spent most of his life in Brooklyn, New York, studying art at the Brooklyn Institute and helping to found the Brooklyn Art Association.

Williamson was particularly drawn to mountain scenery and made frequent painting trips to the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains, as well as the Berkshire Mountains, White Mountains, and Green Mountains of New England. His intimate, poetic views drew from the atmospheric style of the Luminists and bear comparison to the works of John Frederick Kensett and Sanford Robinson Gifford.

In the mid-nineteenth century, his vivid depictions of nature earned a great deal of recognition, and Williamson was named an Associate at the National Academy of Design in 1861. He exhibited there regularly, and featured his paintings at the American Art-Union, the Utica Art Association, and in galleries throughout Boston and Washington. His work is now in The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Hudson River Museum, and the Maier Museum of Art, among other prominent institutions.

Artist Profile Page: Williamson, John / Categories: Landscape, Luminist, Still Life

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Barbizon School, Hudson River School, Landscape

Max Weyl (1837-1914) American, European

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 28” x 23”
Frame Size: 29” x 25”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $7500

Biography/Statement

The story of Max Weyl’s life includes his evolution from a watchmaker too shy to hang his paintings in his own shop window, to finally doing so, and having a major collector see the work and buy it, thus launching the artist in Washington, D.C. But, in the end, Weyl would begin to copy his own, too successful landscapes.

Essentially self-taught, Weyl would draw on three major influences in his art, from Hudson River School through Barbizon School to the American painter George Inness.

Born near Wurttemberg, Germany in Muhlen-am-Neckar in 1837, Weyl was a watchmaker’s apprentice there, eventually opening his own jewelry store in 1861 in Washington after emigrating to the United States. He started painting flowers and still-lifes as a hobby, working on his art for the next ten years. Not until 1870, did he gather the courage to exhibit his work in his store window.

It was at that point that Weyl’s personal miracle occurred—the appearance of a wealthy patron who loved his work and was well connected. He was Samuel Kauffmann, President of the Board of Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and publisher of the “Evening Star” newspaper. Kauffman, of all things, stopped by Weyl’s shop to have his watch repaired. He saw the artist’s paintings and bought a small landscape. That was the beginning. Kauffman continued to purchase paintings as the years went by, as did such Presidential wives as Mrs. Grover Cleveland and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, who would buy and hang Max Weyl’s landscapes of the Washington, D.C. area in the White House.

Weyl still described himself as a jeweler and watchmaker until 1878, when he listed himself as an artist in directories. In 1879, he went to Europe to see the art in the museums. Financed by a successful first exhibition of his paintings, this experience precipitated the Barbizon influence (he came to be called the “American Daubigny” after the well-known Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny).

Weyl’s success and fame grew during the remaining twenty years of the Nineteenth Century, up to his death in 1914. The years of the Twentieth Century saw the influence of Inness in Weyl’s handling of light in poetic landscapes of the Potomac River marshes and Rock Creek Valley just outside Washington. It was the paintings of the latter subject that the artist eventually turned into a formula because of their popularity.

Max Weyl was a member of the Washington Art Club. His work is seen at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Source: David Michael Zellman, “Three Hundred Years of American Art”

Artist Profile Page: Weyl, Max / Categories: Barbizon School, Hudson River School, Landscape

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Barbizon School, Landscape, Tonalism

John Francis Murphy (1853-1921) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 20” x 12”
Frame Size: 26” x 18”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $4800

Biography/Statement

Known for his Tonalist-style landscape paintings, John Francis Murphy was referred to as the “American Corot” because of his similarity to the painting style of Camille Corot (1796-1875), one of the original Barbizon painters in France.

Murphy was born on December 11, 1853 in Oswego, New York.  Completely self-taught, he kept his studio for many years in New York City.  His work was first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1876, where he was inducted eleven years later.

He won numerous prizes, medals and honors for his landscape paintings, which are said to rank with those of George Inness, Alexander Wyant, and Homer Martin. Although his world was a limited one, his landscapes captured the forms of nature and the subtle nuances of the scene.

Artist Profile Page: Murphy, John Francis / Categories: Barbizon School, Landscape, Tonalism

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Impressionism, Landscape

Peter Bela Mayer (1888-1954) American, European

A View Of Eastport, Maine

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 36” x 40”
Frame Size: 44” x 48”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $9500

Biography/Statement

Bela Mayer, landscape painter and textile designer, was born in Loeche, Hungary, 1887.  It is not known when he immigrated to the United States; however he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1908.  For the next seven years he would study art there under the tutelage of C. Y. Turner, Ivan Olinsky and E. Ward.

After finishing his schooling, Mayer moved to Long Island, and would stay in the New England area all of his life.  He visited Gloucester and other locations on Cape Anne, Massachusetts.

Sometime during the 1940s, Bela Mayer added the Peter to his name in order to distance himself from female artists with his same first name.  Though he changed his name, his belief that “balance is the most important element in a painting” never wavered; he was quoted saying this at a showing of his work in Roslyn, New Jersey in 1984.

His Impressionist paintings combine the organic lines of nature perfectly with the more structural and geometric lines of man in a non-abrasive, harmonious manner.  He spent his time outdoors painting towns along the Hudson and around his home in Long Island.

Artist Profile Page: Mayer, Peter Bela / Categories: Impressionism, Landscape

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Landscape

Carl Wuermer (1900-1981) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 34” x 36”
Frame Size: 44” x 46”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $18000

Biography/Statement

Known for serene, realistic landscapes, he was a widely exhibited painter who won numerous awards including the J. Francis Murphy Memorial Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1928. Many of his paintings convey a sense of panorama and lead the eye into deep vistas. For much of his career Wuermer painted near Woodstock, NY.

Wuermer was born in Munich, Germany, and in 1915, emigrated to Chicago where from 1920 to 1924, he studied at the Art Institute with Wellington Reynolds. He then went to New York City for study at the Art Students League. In 1929, he was accepted for artist membership by the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City. His technique was similar to that of the Pointillists although the final effect was much more exact and realistic. He slowly built up the paint on his canvas by using dots of color.

Artist Profile Page: Wuermer, Carl / Categories: Landscape

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