Innholdsfortegnelse for March-April 2022/ No. 62 i American Fine Art Magazine

Born in 1837, Thomas Moran emigrated from England with his family at the age of seven, settling in Philadelphia. His eldest brother Edward pursued a career in the fine arts, making his debut at a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition in 1854. Thomas later credited Edward’s courage to follow his passion with giving him and his brothers the impetus to do the same: “It is scarcely probable that any of us would have been painters had it not been for Edward’s encouragement and assistance…he gave us our bent, and such successes as we have attained, we primarily owe to him.” Edward eventually focused on seascapes, while Thomas honed his skills in landscape painting. Both Morans were inspired by J. M. W. Turner, traveling together to England in 1862…

John Kane was born in Scotland and as a young man, emigrated to the United States, where he worked in the railroad and steel industries in Pennsylvania. Following an accident, he began to paint railroad cars, learning to mix pigments, and spent his spare time drawing his surroundings. He primarily painted pictures of railroad cars, portraits of working-class people in Pittsburgh, and the city’s industrial landscape. The current example shows a pastoral setting outside of the city, but references the industrial lifeblood of the area by including billowing smokestacks in the upper left. The rolling green hills are dotted with homes, farms, people, and animals, detailed renderings signature of the self-taught artist’s style. Debra Force FINE ART, INC. 13 EAST 69TH STREET SUITE 4F NEW YORK 10021 TEL 212.734.3636 WWW.DEBRAFORCE.COM…

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why? I would really love to see Kehinde Wiley’s A Portrait of a Young Gentleman at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in Southern California. This commissioned artwork debuted in October 2021 and is positioned across from Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, (ca. 1770). As a curator of Old Masters, I love projects that make a point of showing how relevant the art of the past is to all of us, including artists, who live in the present. Creating a dialogue between contemporary artists and the masters who preceded them illustrates that art is a continuum and artists do not create in a vacuum. What are you reading? I’m reading…

Quilcene, Washington, is a rural turn-in-the-road that most will encounter by way of the few seconds it takes to drive through town en route to the many camping destinations found in the Olympic Mountains looming blue on the horizon. Yet, among the cedars and firs of this community lies a testament to the creation of the American arthistoric vision of the Pacific Northwest: the Fine Art and Period Furniture Collection at the Quilcene Historical Museum’sWorthington Mansion. The 17-roomVictorian home was built in the late 1880s and was occupied by the Worthington family until 2012, when the Quilcene Historical Museum acquired the Worthington Mansion. Since then, the museum has restored the mansion to its original state. The restoration has included furnishing the space with furniture contemporary to its time, and displaying…

Albert Bierstadt satisfied Americans’ desire to have a Swiss Alps of their own by painting theatrical and, sometimes imaginative, scenes of the Rocky Mountains and points west. Our collector purchased a Bierstadt painting of the Swiss Alps as a 50th birthday present for her now late husband, beginning a focus on mountains in their collection. The Bierstadts in her collection have the freshness and spontaneity of field studies from before the artist developed them into overwrought studio paintings. “I prefer a natural feeling in the paintings,” she comments. She and her husband met in college in the East, married and moved to the Pacific Northwest where he began building a company and she began building its corporate collection. She says, “When the business was starting in 1981, we started buying…

April 11-July 31 The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10028 t: (212) 535-7710 www.metmuseum.org Winslow Homer (1836-1910), well-known for his bucolic paintings and those of ocean waves on the rocky shore, began his career making wood engravings of battle and bivouac scenes from the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly. The men in his Civil War images were drawn as individuals, not as idealized homogeneous warriors. His paintings often depicted sailors, their wives and children pitted against the vagaries of the ocean. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NewYork City explores this aspect of his work in the exhibition Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, opening April 11 and continuing through July 31. The museum explains that the exhibition reconsiders “the artist’s work through the lens of conflict, a…

April 29-May 1 The Philadelphia Show Philadelphia Museum of Art 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway Philadelphia, PA 19130 www.thephiladelphiashow.com After two years of virtual events, The Philadelphia Show is back in-person and thrilled to celebrate its 60th anniversary. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will be hosting the show on museum grounds for the first time since its inauguration, marking a “significant step in the fair’s evolution and growth,” says the show press release. This year will feature 40 prominent exhibitors throughout the U.S., specializing in fine art, antiques and decorative arts, with works spanning from the 16th through the 21st centuries. “We are all delighted this mainstay of Philadelphia art and culture is still here!” says Lynn Gadsden, chairman of The Philadelphia Show. “For the first time ever, the show will…

March 31 Swann Auction Galleries 104 E. 25th Street New York, NY 10010 t: (212) 254-4710 www.swanngalleries.com After a record-breaking African American Art sale at Swann Auction Galleries in October 2021, representatives are beyond excited to see what the new year brings for their March 31 auction of the same category. The upcoming sale, held in a virtual format, boasts about 235 lots by noteworthy African American artists. “The market has been incredibly strong, and continues to grow despite the turmoil and difficulty of the last couple years,” says Nigel Freeman, director of African American art. “Our market has been very robust, with our last two sales being some of our best. We continue to see the growth of both contemporary artists that are very much a part of the…

This year holds a lot of excitement for the National Museum of Wildlife Art, beginning with a recently acquired and rare piece byThomas Moran. While the museum has displayed the renowned landscape painter and printmaker’s work before, the pieces were only available on loan. With the generous donation of trustee emeritus, Lynn Friess, the NMWA now has their first ever Moran painting to add to their permanent collection. The acquired painting, Eternal Snows of Mount Moran, Teton Range, is a significant contribution for many reasons. For starters, the NMWA notes that depictions of Moran’s Tetons, from one of his expeditions in what is now known as Grand Teton National Park, are few and far between. In addition, the museum is located only 2 miles from the entrance of the park,…

Some artists enjoy success while they are alive and their deaths only seem to increase their fame. For others, the converse is true. Fame is followed by a fall into obscurity after death. Still others rise and fall, or fall and rise only to fall away again, in and out of favor with the winds of the zeitgeist. The reasons for this are often shrouded in mystery, or we like to think they are, reasons having to do with the art market—which we barely understand—and the question of taste—which we don’t understand at all and, wisely or unwisely, rarely speak of or write about. Occasionally, however, an artist comes along whose trajectory we can trace, whose public prominence when he was alive is readily understood, and whose swift lapse into…

March 10-April 9 Questroyal Fine Art 903 Park Avenue, Third Floor New York, NY 10075 t: (212) 744-3586 www.questroyalfineart.com Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was born in Lancashire, England. His family immigrated to the United States when he was 17. He enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1823 and two years later moved to NewYork where he discovered the Hudson RiverValley and the Catskill Mountains. He and other artists strove to create a uniquely American art and their loose fellowship became known as the Hudson River School. Their work informed an emerging national identity. Commenting on light in the landscape, Cole wrote, “The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the…

The eighth edition of the FOG Design+Art fair came back strong this past January 20 to 23 after a hiatus in 2021 due to the pandemic. Kicking off the fair was a Preview Gala at the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture on Wednesday, January 19, benefitting educational programs and exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. FOG saw excellent attendance throughout the four days, with exhibitors, curators, collectors and attendees noting well-curated presentations, robust sales and fantastic artwork. Featured at the 2022 fair was an international selection of 45 art and design galleries, including 10 dealers who participated for the first time. “This was RYAN LEE’s first FOG fair, and it was a huge success,” says Jeff Lee, owner of NewYork-based RYAN LEE Gallery. “Our time…

April 12, 10 a.m. Bonhams 7601 W. Sunset Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90046 t: (323) 436-5413 www.bonhams.com California has attracted artists for centuries because of the vast array of terrain, from mountains to beaches. Art movements and colonies special to the state were formed over the years, and their mark on art history has been lasting and fruitful. On April 12, Bonhams will host its next California Art sale at its showroom in Los Angeles. There will be around 125 lots in the sale ranging from the master impressionists of the region to 19th-century scenes. Highlights will include works by Granville Redmond: the nearly 5 feet high In Southern California and the 20-by-30-inch Lupines and Poppies that both have estimates of $100,000 to $150,000. According to Bonhams’ director of California…

SANTA FE, NM SANTA FE ART AUCTION MARCH 13 Prints + Works on Paper Santa Fe Art Auction hosts its Prints + Works on Paper sale this March, featuring an array of two-dimensional historic and contemporary works of art. The sale makes up a “wonderfully broad overview of works on paper, prints and multiples, both American and international, historic and contemporary,” according to Santa Fe Art Auction president Gillian Blitch. Included in the sale are woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, serigraphs and more, by such artists as Gene Kloss, Will Shuster, Howard Cook, Woody Crumbo, Fritz Scholder, Carl Oscar Borg and R.C. Gorman, to name a few. Blitch adds that among the highlights in the auction are a beautiful group of Janet Lipponcott monotypes and John Nieto lithographs. The Prints + Works…

The American Art market is quite strong at the present time. Works that are fresh to market, that have dynamic provenance and are in good condition are always of great interest to collectors. While private collectors are a core part of our buyer base, institutional collections have been expanding their bidding and buying of late, particularly looking for works that are outliers which round out the collections to make them more diverse. Works of American modernism and realism in particular have been achieving great prices both via auction and private sale channels. Works by Luigi Lucioni, Milton Avery, Charles Burchfield, Andrew Wyeth and John Koch have been doing exceptionally well. We regularly get requests for works of illustration art from artists such as Norman Rockwell, Joseph Leyendecker and N.C. Wyeth.…

Jerome Myers (1847-1940) Billy Rose’s Music Hall Jerome Myers was born inVirginia and moved to NewYork City in 1886 at age 19. Inspired by his home in the Lower East Side, he chose to depict the immigrant neighborhoods and bustling markets he observed in his daily life. Additionally, his sketches and paintings of NewYork also extended to gatherings, celebrations and performances. The current example, Billy Rose’s Music Hall, shows the lavish interior of a music hall opened by Broadway producer Billy Rose at 52nd Street and Broadway in 1934. Filled with patrons raptly watching the performance and those conversing amongst themselves, the complex, multi-tiered composition is brimming with color and detail, conveying both the height of Myers’ artistic skill and his continued dedication to capturing the everyday NewYork City subjects…

April 8-9 Scottsdale Art Auction 7176 Main Street Scottsdale, AZ 85251 t: (480) 945-0225 www.scottsdaleartauction.com On April 8 and 9 Scottsdale Art Auction will return to Scottsdale, Arizona, where it will offer a variety of artwork—from cowboys and cattle to sporting and wildlife scenes—from some of the top Western artists, as well as artists who are recognized more broadly within the American art market. “We’re seeing lots of interest all around for our April sale. Some of it is more specific to our Western work, but some of it is coming from the larger art market in general,” auction partner Michael Frost says. “The wonderful thing about our sale is we have plenty of people who collect Western, and plenty who collect the more historic American work that appears in…

March 4-5, 10 a.m.Copley Fine Art Auctions 65 Sharp Street Hingham, MA 02043 t: (617) 536-0030 www.copleyart.com This March 4 and 5, Copley Fine Art Auctions hosts its 2022 Winter Sale. The two-day sale, held in a virtual format, will include noteworthy decoys and sporting art from single-owner estates. Leading the sale are several works by Ogden M. Pleissner. A watercolor titled Golden Hours is expected to bring in between $60,000 and $90,000. The piece is considered one of Pleissner’s most important and successful fishing scenes. His watercolor Grassing the Boat, depicting a day of hunting at the famed Long Point Club, has a presale estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Watercolors continue to shine in the auction with three pieces by Aiden Lassell Ripley: The Rock in the River (est.…

In November, Christie’s took a new strategy for the traditional American Art sale, deciding to dedicate one auction to primarily modernist works in November and a second on January 19 to its 19th Century American Art artwork. The January sale paid off, as its placement around NewYork City’s Americana Week drew interest from new buyers and others of complementary collecting categories. “We were absolutely thrilled with results of the January auction,” says the auction house’s junior specialist Caroline Seabold. “I think the numbers of the sale sort of speak for themselves. The sale was 90 percent sold by lot, and if you look, we’ve been doing some comparisons of 19th-century market over the past few years and the average sell-through rate since 2019 is about 71 percent. We’re about 18 points…

Pennsylvania Impressionism was the star of Freeman’s American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists auction on December 5. There were multiple world records set throughout the day, and the section devoted to the collection ofVirginia and Stuart Peltz had a rare white glove results. In all, the auction achieved $5.15 million, solidifying the growing success of the market. Raphaël Chatroux, head of sale, says, “There was a lot of interest in the sale. In particular, the important section from the collection of Virginia Peltz. It was all Pennsylvania Impressionist works, but very academic and very well known because they were collected early on.” The Peltzes began collecting in the 1980s and decided to purchase one painting by each of the New Hope School artists. Every one of the paintings had never appeared…