Sanford Robinson Gifford

Mount Etna from Catania

1868

Signed and dated right of center: J.F. Cropsey / 1852

Signed lower right: F.A. SILVA.

Leading Hudson River School Painter Famous for New England Views.

Signed lower left in arrowhead: RA Blakelock.

Prominent Luminist Hudson River School painter.

Signed and dated lower right: WM. T. Richards - 1873.

Oil on wood panel painting of a Worcester, Massachusetts view by local resident artist Mabel Blake. Signed M. Blake lower left. Circa 1880. Condition is good. The bucolic scene depicts a man in a boat...

Luminous Hudson River School landscape of sunset over water with red buoy in foreground and sailing ships in background in the style of Alfred Thompson Briche...

American artist William Fitz was a 19th C painter who lived and worked in NY. The work completed in 1876, it is better than a J.G. Brown. Painting depic...

George Inness (1825 - 1894) A Cloudy Day, 1886 Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Signed and dated lower center Provenance: The artist Estate of the above Fifth Avenue Galleries, New York, Executor's Sale of Paintings by the Late George Inness, N.A., February 12 - 14, 1895, Lot 132 Joseph H. Spafford, acquired from the above Mrs. Spafford, by bequest from the above Leroy Ireland, New York, 1951 Ernest Closuit, Fort Worth, Texas Meredith Long & Company, Houston, Texas, circa 1960 Private Collection Shannon's Fine Art, American and European Fine Art Auction, October 27, 2016, Lot 42 Exhibited: New York, American Fine Arts Society, Exhibition of the Paintings Left by the Late George Inness, December 27, 1894, no. 90.  Literature: LeRoy Ireland, The Works of George Inness: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonne, Austin, Texas, 1965, p. 336, no. 1324, illustrated. Michael Quick, "George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonne," Vol. II, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2007, pp. 282-83, 311, no. 966, illustrated.  George Inness, one of America's foremost landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, was born in 1825 near Newburgh, New York. He spent most of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. He was apprenticed to an engraving firm until 1843, when he studied art in New York with Regis Gignoux, a landscape painter from whom he learned the classical styles and techniques of the Old Masters. In 1851, sponsored by a patron, Inness made a fifteen-month trip to Italy. In 1853 he traveled to France, where he discovered Barbizon landscape painting, leading him to adopt a style that used looser, sketchier brushwork and more open compositions, emphasizing the expressive qualities of nature. After working in New York from 1854 to 1859, he moved to Medfield, Massachusetts, and four years later to New Jersey, where through a fellow painter he began to experiment with using glazes that would allow him to fill his compositions with subtle effects of light. Duncan Phillips remarked on Inness’s mellow light as a unifying force, saying, “…he was equipped to modernize the grand manner of Claude and to apply the methods of Barbizon to American subjects." At this time also, Inness developed an interest in the religious theories of Emanuel Swedenborg...

Monogram lower right. But for sheer numbers, as well as degree of fame, the activity which is most closely linked with this Adirondack town is painting. Mrs. Peggy O'Brien, who has long studied Adirondack artists, finds over 400 have painted in these mountains and Keene Valley was the summer capital for many of them. The earliest in the valley are Asher B. Durand (1796-1800), considered a co-founder of the Hudson River School, John Casilear (1811 -1893) and John F. Kensett (1816 - 1871) coming in 1848. Frederick Perkins came in 1857, boarded at the Bruce home, and with Orson Phelps sat on Mt. Marcy and named Skylight, Basin and Saddelback Mountains. Roswell Shurtleff came first to Keene Valley in 1868 and returned each year for the rest of his life, being, with A.H. Wyant, the first artists to have summer places here. Wyant built on the hillside east of the AuSable, Shurtleff on the west. Winslow Homer joined John Fitch and Shurtleff in Keene Valley for hunting, fishing, and painting. John Adams Parker was here by 1866, subsequently building. Robert Monior came in 1875 and by 1882 had a house that became a center for art students. Samuel Coleman arrived in the 1860's. Homer Martin (1836-1897), Sanford Gifford (1823-1880), and Arthur Parton (1842-1914) are but a few more of the recognized American artists who painted the AuSable lakes and mountain of Keene in the nineteenth century. In fact, the Heidelberg Museum of the Paletinate's salute to the American Bicentennial was a 1976 exhibit of work by the first German to the American scenes, a man named Kappel, and featured scenes around Beede's. John Marin brought Keene Valley art into the twentieth century. Harold Weston, son of S. Burns Weston, wintered alone at his AuSable Club studio 1920-21 to start his painting career, and gave us later life a good local history as well as art sampling in his autobiography Freedom in the Wilds (1971). Present day artists living or working in the town include Bruce Mitchell...

Signed and dated "Henry Bacon 1881" lower right. Provenance: private collection About this artist: A figure painter in the conservative tradition of the late 19th century French, H...