Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) American
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 32” x 22”
Frame Size: 42” x 32”
Price: $9500
*Attributed to / Not signed
Biography/Statement
Ammi Phillips was born in Colebrook, Connecticut and began painting portraits of western Massachusetts subjects in about 1811. In 1813 he married Laura Brockway of Schodack, New York, and briefly lived in Troy before settling in Rhinebeck, in Dutchess County. While there, Phillips painted likenesses on both sides of the New York/New England border. These “Border Period” portraits, executed in pastel shades from 1812 through 1819, feature sitters with gangly arms, glancing sideways. In the 1820s, Phillips experimented with dark and light color contrasts in his portraits of Dutchess, Orange, and Columbia County residents.
After his first wife’s death, Phillips remarried, lived for a time in Amenia, New York, and then settled in 1836 in Kent and Sharon, Connecticut. His “Kent Period” portraits feature darker compositions, often with brilliant patches of bright color, and elegant, graceful poses and facial expressions.
Phillips returned to Amenia in about 1838, lived in Northeast, New York for a decade, and died in Curtisville, New York in 1865. His more than six hundred extant likenesses span an artistic career of nearly sixty years.
Artist Profile Page: Phillips, Ammi / Categories: Portrait
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Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) American
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 34” x 28”
Price: SOLD
Biography/Statement
Ammi Phillips was born in Colebrook, Connecticut and began painting portraits of western Massachusetts subjects in about 1811. In 1813 he married Laura Brockway of Schodack, New York, and briefly lived in Troy before settling in Rhinebeck, in Dutchess County. While there, Phillips painted likenesses on both sides of the New York/New England border. These “Border Period” portraits, executed in pastel shades from 1812 through 1819, feature sitters with gangly arms, glancing sideways. In the 1820s, Phillips experimented with dark and light color contrasts in his portraits of Dutchess, Orange, and Columbia County residents.
After his first wife’s death, Phillips remarried, lived for a time in Amenia, New York, and then settled in 1836 in Kent and Sharon, Connecticut. His “Kent Period” portraits feature darker compositions, often with brilliant patches of bright color, and elegant, graceful poses and facial expressions.
Phillips returned to Amenia in about 1838, lived in Northeast, New York for a decade, and died in Curtisville, New York in 1865. His more than six hundred extant likenesses span an artistic career of nearly sixty years.
Artist Profile Page: Phillips, Ammi / Categories: Portrait
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Edward Hopper (1882-1967) American
Self portrait attributed to Edward Hopper
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 24” x 18”
Frame Size: 32” x 26”
Price: $28000
*Attributed to / Not signed
Biography/Statement
Born in 1882 in Nyack, a small town on the Hudson River about forty miles north of New York City, Edward Hopper was the son of a local businessman. After spending a brief period at a school for illustrators, he attended the New York School of Art from 1900 to 1906. His teachers there were William Merritt Chase, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Robert Henri. Henri, above all, became important to Hopper, not so much in artistic as in personal terms, for Henri was a man who set high standards for himself and his students. It was also he who pointed out that everyday American life contained an inexhaustible reservoir of new and untried subject matter.
Robert Henri has gone down in art history as a co-founder of The Eight, a group of artists who in spring 1908, prevented from exhibiting in the prestigious National Academy of Design, mounted their own show at the Macbeth Gallery, New York. Henri set European masters on a par with the American artists he admired, even giving them priority, and that not only in chronological terms. In the late 1880s and the middle of the 1890s, Henri had studied in Paris for extended periods, responding to the call of France like many American artists of the day, before returning home with a renewed consciousness of their American roots. To his students, Henri extolled the old and modern masters who meant so much to him: Rembrandt, Diego Velazquez, Vermeer, Manet, Degas, Daumier – an odd mixture, but indicative of the eye of a born realist who was interested above all in the representation of the human figure.
Being a student of Robert Henri, Hopper was almost preordained to go to Paris. His initial stay lasted from October 1906 to August 1907. Unlike his teacher, Hopper did not enroll in a school or academy, but conducted his studies in museums and on the streets. He returned to Paris twice, in 1909 and 1910, for brief stays.
The key accomplishment of the early period was an assimilation of Impressionism. Hopper’s palette grew lighter, his brushwork freer, and his observation more precise. His approach to motifs began to show a growing independence from any model or ideal, both in the American subjects and the Paris ones. Under the Impressionist spell, Hopper discovered the unique light of Paris: “The light was different from anything I had known,” he later recalled. “The shadows were luminous, more reflected light. Even under the bridges there was a certain luminosity.”
From Paris Hopper undertook trips to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, and Toledo. In the Netherlands, apart from Rembrandt, he discovered Vermeer as a painter of spiritual illumination and an incomparable master of the intimate interior. Among French painters, Hopper was impressed by Manet and Edega Degas, Camille Pissarro and Sisley, but the deepest involvement came with the work of Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. Fauvism and the beginnings of Cubism, on the other hand, seem to have escaped Hopper’s notice. His preoccupation with the great masters, among whom the Impressionists were already beginning to figure, apparently led Hopper to overlook the contemporary avant-garde. “Whom did I meet? Nobody,” he later admitted. “I’d heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don’t remember having heard of Pablo Picasso at all.”
In the 1910s, Hopper struggled for recognition. He exhibited his work in a variety of group shows in New York, including the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910) and the famous Armory Show of 1913, in which he was represented by a painting titled “Sailing”. Although he worked primarily in oil painting, he also mastered the medium of etching, which brought him more immediate success in sales. He began living in the Greenwich Village neighborhood, where he would continue to maintain a studio throughout his career, and he adopted a lifelong pattern of spending the summers in New England. In 1920, at the age of thirty-seven, he received his first one-person exhibition. The Whitney Studio Club, recently founded by the heiress and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, showed sixteen of his paintings. Although nothing was sold from the exhibition, it was a symbolic milestone in Hopper’s career.
Just a few years later, Hopper found himself in a far more prosperous and prominent position as an artist. His second one-person exhibition, at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York, was such a commercial success that every painting was sold; the Rehn Gallery would represent him for the rest of his career. In 1930, his painting House by the Railroad was the first work to be acquired for the collections of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art. This image embodied the characteristics of Hopper’s style: clearly outlined forms in strongly defined lighting, a cropped composition with an almost “cinematic” viewpoint, and a mood of eerie stillness. Meanwhile, Hopper’s personal life had also advanced: in 1923, he married the artist Josephine Verstille Nivison, who had been a fellow student in Robert Henri’s class. Jo, as Hopper called her, would become an indispensable element of his art. She posed for nearly all of his female figures and assisted him with arranging the props and settings of his studio sessions; she also encouraged him to work more extensively in the medium of watercolor painting, and kept meticulous records of his completed works, exhibitions, and sales.
In 1933, Hopper received further critical recognition as the subject of a retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art. He was by then celebrated for his highly identifiable mature style, in which urban settings, New England landscapes, and interiors are all pervaded by a sense of silence and estrangement. His chosen locations are often vacant of human activity, and they frequently imply the transitory nature of contemporary life. At deserted gas stations, railroad tracks, and bridges, the idea of travel is fraught with loneliness and mystery. Other scenes are inhabited only by a single pensive figure or by a pair of figures who seem not to communicate with one another. These people are rarely represented in their own homes; instead, they pass time in the temporary shelter of movie theaters, hotel rooms, or restaurants. In Hopper’s most iconic painting, Nighthawks, four customers and a waiter inhabit the brightly lit interior of a city diner at night. They appear lost in their own weariness and private concerns, their disconnection perhaps echoing the wartime anxiety felt by the nation as a whole.
The Hoppers spent nearly every summer from 1930 through the 1950s in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, particularly in the town of Truro, where they built their own house. Hopper used several nearby locations as frequent, repeated subjects in his art. He also began to travel farther for new imagery, to locations ranging from Vermont to Charleston, an automobile trip through the Southwest to California, and four visits to Mexico. Wherever he traveled, however, Hopper sought and explored his chosen themes: the tensions between individuals (particularly men and women), the conflict between tradition and progress in both rural and urban settings, and the moods evoked by various times of day.
Hopper’s work was showcased in several further retrospective exhibitions throughout his later career, particularly at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; in 1952, he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Despite commercial success and the awards he received in the 1940s and 1950s, Hopper found himself losing critical favor as the school of Abstract Expressionism came to dominate the art world. Even during an era of national prosperity and cultural optimism, moreover, his art continued to suggest that the individual could still suffer a powerful sense of isolation in postwar America. He never lacked popular appeal, however, and by the time of his death in 1967, Hopper had been reclaimed as a major influence by a new generation of American realist artists.
Artist Profile Page: Hopper, Edward / Categories: Portrait
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Boston School (1890-1910) American
Boston School Portrait Of Edward Breck (American, 1861-1929)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 34” x 30”
Frame Size: 44” x 40”
Price: SOLD
Biography/Statement
Artist Profile Page: Boston School / Categories: Portrait
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Henri LeRiche (1868-1944)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 17” x 12.5”
Frame Size: 23” x 18”
Signature: Signed lower left
Price: $3800
Biography/Statement
Born in Grenoble, he was known primarily as a painter and etcher.
Sources: http://www.paramourfinearts.com/list_works.asp?id=1053
Artist Profile Page: LeRiche, Henri / Categories: Portrait
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Thomas Sully (1783-1872)
The Andrews Misses
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 24” x 19”
Frame Size: 30” x 26”
Signature: Philadelphia canvas stamp verso
Price: $12500
Biography/Statement
Thomas Sully, (born June 19, 1783, Horncastle, Lincolnshire, Eng.—died Nov. 5, 1872, Philadelphia), one of the finest U.S. portrait painters of the 19th century.
Sully’s parents moved to the United States in 1792, settling in Charleston, S.C. He was a pupil of Gilbert Stuart in Boston (1807) and of Benjamin West in London (1809) and was influenced by the portrait artist Sir Thomas Lawrence. After 1810 he made Philadelphia his home, although in 1838 he visited London to paint a full-length portrait of the young Queen Victoria for the Society of the Sons of St. George of Philadelphia. His masterpiece in portraiture is “Col. Thomas Handasyd Perkins” (1831–32; Boston Athenaeum); his best known painting is “The Passage of the Delaware” (1819; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Sully was an industrious painter who worked rapidly; he left about 2,000 portraits, a number of miniatures, and more than 500 subject and historical pictures. His paintings are elegant and romantically warm, emphasizing an economy of form and of color, but his later work suffered from the sentimentality of the mid-19th century.
Source: Britannica
Artist Profile Page: Sully, Thomas / Categories: Portrait
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Carlo Cherubini (1890-1978) European
"Paris, 1930"
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 40” x 29”
Frame Size: 50” x 39”
Signature: Signed and dated "Paris, 1930"
Price: SOLD
Biography/Statement
Carlo Cherubini was born in Venice, son of a famous Venetian painter. He took part in 1914 at the International Exhibition of Venice and the decoration of the Lido in Paris by painting many decorative panels around the theme of carnival. In 1930, he received the medal of honor at the Salon of French Artists and the silver medal in 1932. His works belong to several museums in Italy and many private collections.
Artist Profile Page: Cherubini, Carlo / Categories: Figurative, Portrait
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Dennis Sheehan (1950-) Contemporary, American
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Image Size: 20” x 16”
Frame Size: 24” x 20”
Signature: Signed Lower Right
Price: $1800
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: Portrait
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Desire Francois Laugee (1823-1896) European
Medium: Oil on Wood Panel
Image Size: 13” x 19”
Signature: Signed and dated 1881 right center
Price: SOLD
Biography/Statement
Désiré-François Laugée was a versatile artist who exhibited at the Paris Salon annually for a fifty-year period (1845-95). Born at Maromme near Rouen, he began his artistic training at Saint-Quentin with Louis-Nicolas Lemasle (1788-1870), a student of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). He then studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the well-known teacher François Edouard Picot (1786-1868), another student of David. In his paintings of historical and religious subjects Laugée achieves emotional intensity though the powerful rendering of his figures, and the figures in his portraits and genre pictures have the same solidity and presence. Several of Laugée’s Salon entries were purchased by the French government, including Saint Louis Washing the Feet of the Poor (Ministry of State) and The Death of Zurbaran (Ministry of the Interior). Works in museum collections include Peasant Women of Picardy (Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux) and A Picardy Woman Spinning Wool (Museum of Fine Arts, Amiens).
Artist Profile Page: Laugee, Desire Francois / Categories: Figurative, Portrait
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