Barbizon School, Landscape, Tonalism

Dennis Sheehan (1950-) Contemporary, American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 25” x 36”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $4500

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

Christopher Shearer (1846-1926) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 30” x 50”
Frame Size: 43” x 63”
Signature: Signed and dated 1895 lower left
Price: $12500

Biography/Statement

Landscape artist, Christopher Shearer was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1846. As a child, Shearer spent time in the studios of artists F. D. Devlan and J. Heyl, and in 1864, he produced his first painting. He became a student, of both Devlan and Raser, and his father helped him by building him a studio in the backyard of his Shearertown farm. At the age of 21, Shearer opened a studio in Reading and was very successful in selling his works.

He later traveled to Europe, and studied in Dusseldorf and Munich. In 1878, on a return trip to Germany, he was awarded a Gold Medal by the Dusseldorf School of Art. Shearer exhibited his works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the art exhibition of the Centennial. He also had many of his works hanging in the Reading Museum. His paintings are part of several collections, including ones in Canada, Australia, Germany, and America. Shearer was a teacher, as well as being an artist. He also enjoyed collecting butterflies, moths and bugs, and he kept detailed records and drawings of these insects. The artist died in 1926.

Artist Profile Page: Shearer, Christopher / Categories: Landscape

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Landscape

Julian Rix (1850-1903) American

The Woods Below The Mountains

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 26” x 32”
Frame Size: 36” x 42”
Signature: Original name plaque on frame, titled "The Woods Below The Mountains"
Price: $9500

Biography/Statement

Known for poetic landscapes, often sunset, illuminated by atmospheric light, Julian Walbridge Rix was early in his career an active painter in California and then on the East Coast. He was born in Peacham, Vermont on December 30, 1850 and moved with his family to San Francisco in 1853. He returned to Peacham four years later to live with his grandmother and graduating from Peacham Academy in 1868. He returned to San Francisco where he was apprenticed to a trading firm and later worked in a paint store painting signs and doing decorative work.

Primarily self-taught, he was briefly a pupil of Virgil Williams at the School of Design. He became close friends with Amédée Joullin and Jules Tavernier, and when the latter established an art colony in Monterey in 1876, Rix was one of the “Bohemians” who followed him there. His studio in Monterey was in the French Hotel, but in 1879 he returned to San Francisco and shared a studio with Tavernier at 729 Montgomery Street. The art market in San Francisco during this period was not a healthy one which prompted Rix to move to Paterson, New Jersey in 1880 and subsequently establish a studio in New York City. This milieu was what he seemed to need to find artistic success. His work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design during the 1880s. He studied art briefly in Europe during 1889 and upon his return, he found that his watercolor and oil paintings were in great demand in the East.

He maintained an active interest and participation in the San Francisco art scene and in 1883 sent back 200 paintings for a successful solo show. In 1888 his illustrations appeared in “Picturesque California.” Rix returned to California for several months in 1901 and painted the valleys and mountains near Monterey and Santa Barbara. A handsome man with a New England accent and blond sideburns, he never married and was called the Adonis of the profession. Following a kidney operation, Rix died in New York City on November 24, 1903 and was buried in the cemetery plot of a patron-friend in Paterson, New Jersey.

Artist Profile Page: Rix, Julian / Categories: Landscape

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Landscape, Regionalist (Urban)

Laura Margaret Graham (1862-1938) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 40” x 30”
Frame Size: 49” x 39”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: $7500

Biography/Statement

Born in California in 1862. Graham was a resident of Elk Grove, California in 1880-85. A spinster, she died in Sacramento on June 27, 1938. Exhibited: California State Fair, 1884-85.

Artist Profile Page: Graham, Laura Margaret / Categories: Landscape, Regionalist (Urban)

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Hudson River School, Landscape

Lemuel D. Eldred (1850-1921) American

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 20” x 36”
Frame Size: 25” x 40”
Signature: Signed lower right
Price: SOLD

Biography/Statement

Marine painter and etcher Lemuel D. Eldred was born and raised in Fairhaven, Massachusetts near New Bedford’s whaling community. He studied for a short time at the Academie Julian in Paris (1880) and traveled throughout Europe (1883) but he claimed he was self-taught. He exhibited in Boston and at the National Academy in 1876. His work is represented in the Peabody Museum of Salem, MA, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society and the Kendall Whaling Museum.

Little is known of Lemuel D. Eldred’s life. His work typlifies the late Hudson River School painters’ moral standards and natural views which were popular after 1825 until 1875. In 1876 he moved to Boston where he kept a studio and he became a sought-after, popular marine painter.

Eldred painted realistic canvases in oil of Boston Harbor, the Maine Coast, New York and more often in the seaport town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts where he painted outdoors with his close friend, fellow marine-painter (also from Fairhaven) William Bradford (1823-1892). Although Eldred enjoyed Bradford’s Quaker beliefs and polite mannerisms, he did not join Bradford in his exploratory polar expeditions to Labrador. Similar to some of Bradford’s northern Atlantic coastline paintings, Eldred accurately and surely painted tight, realistic New England coastal villages, harbors, cliffs and beaches.

Artist Profile Page: Eldred, Lemuel D. / Categories: Hudson River School, Landscape

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