Portrait

Lemuel Everett Wilmarth (1835-1918) American

Young Artist at Easel

Medium: Oil on canvas
Image Size: 22” x 18”
Frame Size: 33” x 29”
Signature: Unsigned
Price: $28000

Biography/Statement

Lemuel Everett Wilmarth, a watchmaker, teacher and painter, was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1835. He was known for meticulously painted still lifes and genre scenes, both full of detail and exact finish. He was also unique in that in Paris, he became the first American student to study with Jean Leon Gerome, famous teacher at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and then in New York City, he became the first full-time instructor at the National Academy of Design.

He was raised in Boston, Massachusetts and trained as a watchmaker. While pursuing this job by day, he studied art at night, first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and later at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

In 1859, Wilmarth’s passion and focus turned to art. He went to Germany to study for three and a half years at the Munich Royal Academy of the Fine Arts and then traveled to Paris to study for several years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Gerome.

As Wilmarth’s fine quality paintings became noticed, he was selected to be the first full-time instructor at the National Academy of Design School in New York City. He also became very active in teaching and organizing classes at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts. He stayed with the Academy until 1889 and died in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York. Between 1875 and 1877, he became part of a rebellion against the Academy but then returned to his teaching position.

Source:
Michael David Zellman, “300 Years of American Art”

Artist Profile Page: Wilmarth, Lemuel Everett / Categories: Portrait

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Portrait

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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Portrait

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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Portrait

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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Figurative, Portrait

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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