Lisa Yuskavage (b.1962) - Ackerman's Fine Art

Lisa Yuskavage (b.1962)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Lisa Yuskavage.

William Merritt Chase (1849-1916)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by William Merritt Chase.

Alex Katz (b. 1927)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Alex Katz.

Richard Alan Schmid (b. 1934)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Richard Alan Schmid.

Emil Filla (1882-1953)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Emil Filla.

John Currin (b. 1962)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by John Currin.

Eric Fischl (b. 1948)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Eric Fischl.

Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Lyonel Feininger.

George Condo (b.1957)

George Condo, born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, studied Art History and Music Theory at Lowell University, Massachusetts from 1976 to 1978. Condo is known for his cartoon like paintings that grasp the imagination of many and captures a vast range of reactions. Condo’s artwork has been described as a twist between comedy and tragedy as some of his characters can be found disturbing yet beautiful.

New York’s East Village galleries displayed his work for the first time in 1981. Shortly after this, in 1983, Condo experienced his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at the Ulrike Kantor Gallery. Gaining attention to his unique portrayal of the world, Condo remained busy. Continuing with a two-gallery exhibition at the Pat Hearn and Barbara Gladstone Galleries in New York in 1984.

Condo’s artistic style and unique representation of characters lead him to receive the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.

Another of George Condo’s accomplishments is the release of a documentary film entitled, Condo Painting directed by John McNaughton in 2000.

Condo continues to produce distinctive paintings and works of art to this day, traveling between the United States and Europe participating in various exhibitions.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by George Condo.

Guy Pene Du Bois (1884-1958)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Guy Pene Du Bois.

Robert Alan Bechtle (b. 1932)

Born in 1932 in San Francisco, California, Robert Alan Bechtle was a part of the West Coast photo-realist movement. Bechtle’s artistic nature shinned through at a young age when he began drawing. His future as an artist was encouraged by his family and teachers. The submittal of his artwork the National Endowment for the Arts earned Bechtle a grant that paid for his first year of college. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Art from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, where he studied Graphic Design. Bechtle went on to study painting, and received a Master’s degree in Fine Art. Upon graduation, Robert Bechtle was drafted into the United States Army, and served from 1954 to 1956. He later went on to instruct at the college from 1957 to 1961, and served as an assistant professor in 1962. Robert Alan Bechtle married Nancy Elizabeth Dalton in 1962, with whom he had three children. Bechtle went on to lecture at the University of California at Berkeley from 1965 to 1966, was a visiting artist at the University of California at Davis from 1966 to 1968, and served as an associate professor at the San Francisco State University for thirty years, beginning 1968.

Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliviera served as Robert Alan Bechtle’s original inspiration. However, Bechtle desired to avoid the current style in the 1960s, leading him to realism. He is considered one of the first photo realists, along with Richard Estes, Chuck Close, and Ralph Goings. Infact, Louis Meisel, the man who coined the phrase photo realism, considers Bechtle “the” founder of the photo realism movement. These artists depict outdoor landscapes in their paintings, emulating photographs. Robert Alan Bechtle was inspired by his local surroundings, painting neighborhoods, home exteriors, and streetscapes. With a special attention to automobiles, his paintings reveal his perspective on color, light, shadow, and surface. His work as a West Coast photo realist opposed the still lives and figures which were painted by those of the East Coast. Robert Alan Bechtle is also an accomplished printmaker, beginning in lithography, but working mainly in etching.

Robert Alan Bechtle’s paintings have been exhibited internationally. His paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim Museums in New York. They are also in the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Robert Alan Bechtle.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

Roland Petersen (b. 1926)

An American painter and printmaker of Danish birth, Roland Petersen was born in Endelave, Denmark in 1926. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Master’s degree in 1950. Petersen went on to study painting during the summers of 1950 and 1951 at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1951 and 1952, he studied photography at the California School of Fine Arts in Oakland, and in 1954 at the California College of Arts and Crafts also in Oakland, he studied ceramics. Petersen continued his studies focusing on etching and color printing at the Stanley William Hayter Atlier in Paris in 1950, 1963 and 1971. Rolands Peterson won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. He served as art professor at the University of California, Davis from 1956 to 1991.

Earning a reputation as one of California’s leading contemporary artists, Roland Petersen’s richly colored acrylic genre, interiors, and cityscape pieces are a combination of realism and interlocking geometric shapes. His works are in color intaglio, a category of printmaking techniques including etching, drypoint, and engraving, which is used to achieve textures within the image. Aside from his strong use of color, he is known for his contrast of light and shadow, and the integration of still life, figure, and landscape.

Roland Petersen’s work exhibitions include the Oakland Art Museum in 1954, Crocker Art Museum in 1965, Phoenix Art Museum in 1972, and the University of Reading, England in 1977. His paintings have been displayed in numerous gallery exhibitions in San Francisco between 1978 and 1993. In March 2010, the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California used Peterson’s work as the subject of a major retrospective entitled “Roland Petersen: 50 Years of Painting”.

Other Impressionist Artists
Raoul Dufy
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Lin Fengmiam
Joseph Henry Sharp
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey
Carl Rungius

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Roland Petersen.

Available for Purchase
(click artwork for details)

Chaim Soutine (1893-1942)

Chaïm Soutine, a Jewish painter, was born on January 13, 1893 in Smilavichi (which is now in Belarus), a country on the western border of Russia. Soutine was the tenth of eleven children, their father a tailor. As a child, he took art lessons in the nearby town of Minsk. In 1910, he applied for admission to the School of Fine Arts in Vilna; however, he failed the entrance exam on his first try. He was later successful in enrollment after private lessons from one of the school’s teachers. In 1913, Soutine traveled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Fernand Cormon.

For a time, Chaïm Soutine lived at La Ruche, a residence for struggling artist in Montparnasse. Here he became friends with Amedeo Modigliani, who painted Soutine’s portrait several times, most famously in 1917. The portrait was painted on a door of an apartment belonging to Léopold Zborowski, their art dealer. Zborowski supported Soutine through World War I, taking Soutine with him to Nice to escape the German bombing of Paris. After the war Paul Guillaume, a highly influential art dealer, began to champion the artist’s work. In 1923, prominent American collector Albert C. Barnes bought 60 of Soutine’s paintings.

From 1918 to 1922, Soutine traveled frequently and completed over 200 paintings, sixty of which were purchased by Philadelphia collector, Albert Barnes. Barnes wrote published articles about the quality of Soutine’s paintings. These articles enhanced Soutine’s reputation and brought him more financial stability.

Chaïm Soutine once kept an animal carcass in his studio so he could paint it, resulting in Carcass of Beef. The stench of the dead animal drove neighbors to send for the police, to whom Soutine lectured the relative importance of art over hygiene. He painted 10 works in this series, which have since become his most iconic. These paintings were inspired by Rembrant’s still life of carcasses.

The majority of Chaïm Soutine’s paintings were created from 1920 to 1929. He held his first exhibition in Chicago in 1935. He seldom showed his works, however he did take part in The Origins and Development of International Independent Art exhibition held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1937 in Paris. Soon thereafter, Soutine had to escape from France in order to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. He was on the move from place to place, and was foced to seek shelter outdoors in the forests. Soutine suffered from a stomach ulcer, and left his hiding place for Paris to undergo emergency surgery. The surgery failed to save his life. Chaïm Soutine died of a perforated ulcer on August 9, 1943.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Chaim Soutine.

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958)

Maurice de Vlaminck, a French painter, was born on April 4, 1876 in Paris. He was born to a family of musicians. Vlaminck began painting in his late teens. In 1893, he studied at the Ile de Chatou under painter Henri Rigalon. In 1894, Vlaminck married Suzanne Berly.

When Vlaminck was 23, he met aspiring artist André Derain, with whom he had a life-long friendship. The two rented a studio together for one year. In 1902 and 1903, Vlaminck wrote several mildly pornographic novels that were illustrated by Derain. During this time, Vlaminck painted during the day and earned his livelihood by giving violin lessons and performing with musical bands at night.

In 1911, Mauire de Vlaminck traveled to London and painted by the Thames. He painted with Derain in Marseille and Martigues in 1913. During World War I, Vlaminck was stationed in Paris, where he began writing poetry. He eventually settled in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. He married his second wife, Berthe Combes, with whom he had two daughters. Vlaminck wrote many autobiographies, marred little either by lack of confidence or adherence to the truth.

His works show familiarity with the Impressionists. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color. From 1908 his palette grew more monochromatic. His predominant influence was that of Cézanne. His later work displayed a dark palette, with heavy strokes of contrasting white paint.

Vlaminck’s groundbreaking paintings, Sur le zinc (At the Bar) and L’homme a la pipe (Man Smoking a Pipe) were painted in 1900.

Vlaminck died on October, 11 1958 in Rueil-la-Gadelière.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Maurice de Vlaminck.

Alexi von Jawlensky (1864-1961)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Alexi von Jawlensky.

Emil Nolde (1867-1956)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Emil Nolde.

Rene Magritte (1898-1967)

René François Ghislain Magritte, a Belgian surrealist artist, was born on November 21, 1898 in Lessines. He was the eldest son of Léopold and Régina Magritte. His mother Régina committed suicide on March 12, 1912 by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Supposedly, when his mother’s body was found her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several of Magritte’s paintings in 1927-1928. The paintings depicted people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants.

René Magritte began drawing lessons in 1910. His earliest paintings were Impressionistic in style. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918, under Constant Motald. However, Magritte found the instruction uninspiring. The paintings that he produced from 1916 to 1918 were influenced by Futurism and Cubism, mostly portraying female nudes. His inspiration during this time came from the Purists and Fernand Léger.

Magritte’s acquaintance with Giorgio de Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting) and Dadaistic poetry constituted an important artistic turning point in his career. In1925, together with E.L.T. Mesens, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Schwitters, Tzara and Man Ray, he co-operated in the magazines Aesophage and Marie, and became close with a group of Dadaists.

In 1926, René Magritte produced his first Surrealist painting, entitled The Lost Jockey. From 1927 to 1930, Magritte lived in Frace, establishing relationships with Surrealists, including Max Ernts, Dali, André Breton, and Paul Eluard. While living in Paris, Magritte formed a system of conceptual painting, which remained virtually unchanged until the end of his life. His painting manner was precise and clean, and he was able to depict trustworthy an unreal, unthinkable reality. He used symbols of mirrors, eyes, windows, stages, and curtains and pictures within pictures to demonstrate the problems of visual perception and illusionary of images.
In the 1940s Magritte attempted to change his painting style twice. From 1945 to 1947, during his “vie-heureuse” period, he painted in the style of Renoir. 1947 to 1948 was classified as the “époque vache” or the “Cow Period”. Neither styles proved to be effective; Magritte returned to his previous style.

During the 1950s, René Magritte painted The Enchanted Realm (1953) for a casino in Knokke-le-Zut, and The Ignorant Fairy (1957) for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi. In the last year of his life, Magritte began to make sculptures of his painted images, developing the theme of correlation of mental and material realities.
René Magritte died of cancer on August 15, 1967 in Brussels. He was 69 years old.

Other European Artists
Raoul Dufy
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Edgar Hunt
David Hockney
Jean Dufy
Paul Delvaux

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Rene Magritte.

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

Paul Delvaux was born on September 23, 1897 in Antheit, Belgium. He is famous for his surrealist paintings with female nudes. As a young boy Delvaux took music lessons, studied Greek and Latin, and read the fiction of Jules Verne and the poetry of Homer.

Delvaux studied architecture from 1916 to 1917 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, owing to his parents’ disapproval of his ambition to be a painter. However, he pursued his goal and attended painting classes at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, taught by Constant Montald and Jean Delville from 1919 to 1920. From 1920 to 1921 he served in the Belgain Army, and in 1924 he opened a studio in Brussels.

Paul Delvaux painted heavy landscapes until he was forty; a Flemish variation of the German and Scandinavian expressionism. In 1936 he discovered the surrealist work of de Chirico and Magritte, and destroyed almost every painting he had done before.

During the German occupations in 1940 to 1944, he worked in seclusion on designs for theatre and ballet. From 1949 he lived in Choisel, France, and in 1952 married Anne-Marie (Tam) DeMartelaere. From 1950 to 1962 he was Professor of Painting at the Ecole Nationale Superier d’art and d’architecture in Brussels, and President of the Academie Royale des Beaux-arts in Brussels in 1965. In 1982, the Paul Delvaux Museum opened in Saint-Idesbald.

Delvaux was not formally a member of the surrealist movement, however he was considered to be one of the last of that pionerring group that shocked and offended much of the art world in the 1920s. He gained fame for his depiction of the richness of the subconscious in figurative but irrational images that displayed the impossibility of significant connection between the sexes. He painted nude women in public settings where they were aloof to the experience.

Paul Delvaux died in Veurne on July 20, 1994.

Other European Artists
Raoul Dufy
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Edgar Hunt
David Hockney
Jean Dufy
Rene Magritte

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Paul Delvaux.

Yifei Chen (1946-2005)

Yifei Chen was born in Nigbo, Zhejiang China in 1946. Chen graduated in 1965 from the Shanghai Art Training School. While in Shanghai, Chen gained a position as the head of the Oil Painting Department at the Painting Academy.

Yifei Chen moved to the United States in 1980 to continue his studies in art at Hunter College. Chen moved again in 1982 to Europe to study the Classical European masters of oil painting. In 1983, the first exhibit of his work was held, an exclusive exhibit at the New York’s Hammer Gallery. It proved to be the first of many exhibits. Chen’s work garnered high prices, and he became one of the first Chinese artists to have their work exhibited and sold throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe. During the 1980s, Chen’s artwork became popular not only in China and the United States, but also in Britain, France, and Japan. One of Yifei Chen’s accomplishments was in 1985, when his painting, “Bridge”, was used by the United Nations. Around the same time Armand Hammer who was the chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation gifted another of Yifei Chen’s artworks to Deng Xiaoping.

After Chen’s studies in Europe, he returned to China to start a series of paintings of Waterside villages in the Jiangnan province. In 1990 he took a trip to Tibet and painted several scenes of the culture and scenery there. Chen’s oil paintings consisted of Western and Chinese musicians and ballet dancers as well as landscapes from Venice and China. In 1991, Chen’s painting entitled “Lingering Melodies at Xunyang” sold for over $100,000 in Hong Kong. This was the highest price ever paid for a painting in the Chinese art world.

Yifei Chen was not only a talented and successful artist, but also a film director and fashion designer. In 2001, Chen was the agent for several designers with the fashion magazine called Yifel Vision, which was sponsored by China Youth Magazine. Throughout his lifetime, Chen donated much of his earnings to the charity Project Hope.

Yifei Chen died of an upper-digestive-tract hemorrhage in the Huashan Hospital in Shanghai in 2005.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Yifei Chen.

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

Pierre Bonnard, a French painter, printmaker and founding member of Les Nabis, was born on October 3 1867 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine. Bonnard was the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. Bonnard studied law, graduating and practicing as a barrister briefly. However, he had also attended art classes, and soon decided to become an artist.

Pierre Bonnard worked at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and at the Academie Julian in 1888, where he met Edouard Viullard and Maurice Denis. He began to exhibit in 1891, and in 1896 held his first one-man show. Bonnard and his friends, Roussel and Vallotton, were known as the Nabis (Hebrew for Prophets). During the 1890s and 1900s, Bonnard’s work had affinities with Art Nouveau, with its linear rhythms and decorative qualities.

In 1893, Pierre Bonnard met Marthe de Melingy, whose real name was Marie Mousin. She became Bonnard’s wife and model for the next 40 years. She was painted with great sensuousness in her bath, in her bedroom and in their bed in what critics have called some of the greatest nude paintings of the century.

From 1910, Bonnard developed an enthusiasm for the landscape of the Mediterranean and southern France. In 1915, he became dissatisfied with his work and gave stricter attention to formal qualities. His later paintings showed structural strength. Pierre Bonnard is known for his intense use of color and his often complex compositions. He did not paint from life, but rather drew his subject, sometimes photographing it. He then painted the canvas from his notes.

In 1938, his work was exhibited along with Vuillard’s at the Art Institute of Chicago. He finished his last painting, The Almond Tree in Flower, a week before his death on January 23, 1947. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a posthumous retrospective of Pierre Bonnard’s work. In 1998, two major exhibitions of the artist’s work took place at the Tate Gallery in London, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Pierre Bonnard.

Fengmiam Lin (1900-1990)

Lin Fengmian was born in 1900, a native of Meizhou, Guangdong Province in China. He was born with the name Shaoqiong, but changed it to Fengmian in 1920. His father and grandfather were also artists who painted and carved tombstones. Fengmian created art as a child and sold his first painting at nine years old.

In 1919, he moved to France on a work-study program and worked as a signboard painter in Marseilles. A year later, Fengmian enrolled at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon for six months and drew figures in charcoal. Next he studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He also studied drawing and learned realistic oil painting at the Cormon art studio in Paris. He enjoyed learning the style of western painting, but also wanted to study traditional Chinese art and was able to do so by frequently visiting the Musée Guimet of Eastern Art and Musée National de la Céramique, the national museum of ceramics. In 1922, his oil painting Autumn was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne.

By 1923, Lin Fengmian moved to Berlin, where he was introduced to northern expressionist movements in painting. In 1924, his work was a combination of Eastern and Western concepts and he exhibited over 40 paintings in an exhibition of ancient and modern Chinese art in Strasbourg, organized by the Chinese government. He also had two large oil paintings accepted in the 1924 Salon d’Automne. The following year Lin exhibited in the Chinese section of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs.

He returned to China in 1926 and became director of the National Beijing Fine Art School. By age 29, he was made president of the Hangzhou National College of Art, which later became the prestigious China Academy of Art. In 1928, he initiated the Association for Art Movements in China to promote art. His work was innovative at the time as he both honored traditional art, by using rice paper and ink, and broke from tradition by incorporating more expressive colors and parting from the long scrolls in favor of a square format. Throughout his life, his subjects were mainly landscapes, opera characters, lady figures, flowers, birds and still lifes.

Lin Fengmian’s career would take some tragic turns. By the 1930s, much of his early work was destroyed by the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese war. Fengmian had fled with only his Chinese paintings and was forced to leave his oil paintings behind. Soldiers destroyed his home and the paintings. More work had to be destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Fengmian had been controversial for some time now in China for breaking with tradition and encourage his students and others to open their minds to western movements in art. In 1966, as the Cultural Revolution was underway, Lin soaked his works in water and flushed the pulp down the toilet, so his art could not be used against him or his supporters. He was imprisoned for four years, tortured and persecuted for being an artist and for his way of thinking.

Lin Fengmian’s work was widely exhibited throughout China in his late career including Second National Art Exhibition in Nanjing, solo exhibition at the University of Hong Kong, Fourth National Art Exhibition in Chongqing, Second Joint Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and the Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Painting in Paris. He was a pioneer of modern Chinese art and teacher to the next generation. A retrospective exhibition was held at the National Museum of History in Taipei and a one-man exhibition at the China National Art Museum in Beijing to honor him for his 90th birthday. Lin Fengmian died in 1991.

Other Impressionist Artists
Roland Petersen
Raoul Dufy
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Joseph Henry Sharp
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey
Carl Rungius

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Fengmiam Lin.

Available for Purchase
(click artwork for details)

Jean Dufy (1888-1964)

Jean Dufy was born in Le Havre, France in 1888. He came from a large family with creative talent. His father was an amateur musician and his brother was painter Raoul Dufy, who also found acclaim and was an artistic mentor and inspiration to Jean throughout his life. Jean Dufy is thought to have been exposed to the works of Matisse, Derain and Picasso at the 1906 Le Havre exposition. This experience led him to enroll at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts du Havre, where he studied under his brother, A.E. Othon Friesz and Georges Braque.

Jean Dufy then moved to Paris to live with his brother, with a small scholarship to study with Bonnat. While in Paris, he met Matisse and the other Fauve painters, whose bright colors inspired his work. Between 1905 and 1920, Dufy experimented with Fauvism and Cubism. He was able to earn money by working on a museum staff designing fabrics, and book illustrations.

By 1914, he showed his first watercolors at the Berthe Weill gallery. During his service in the war, Jean continued painting and drawing the flowers, horses, and landscapes he saw while stationed. In 1916, Jean began decorating porcelain for Théodore Haviland in Limoges.

He moved back to Paris in 1920, where Georges Braque was his neighbor. During this time, his work incorporated intense color with bold effects of light. He was able to exhibit his work extensively and showed at the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées and Galerie Bing in Paris, and in New York he showed at Balzac Galleries and Perls Galleries. He also began including musical inspirations into his subject matter. Jean Dufy won a gold medal at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts for the “Châteaux de France” set. At this point in his career, his reputation was established and he was commissioned to paint murals for many French public buildings. For the 1937 World’s Fair, Jean Dufy worked with his brother Raoul Dufy to create a large fresco celebrating electricity for the Paris electricity distribution company.

Jean traveled extensively throughout Europe and North Africa between 1950 and 1960 continuing to paint and draw. Jean Dufy died in 1964 in France. He was an internationally renowned painter with works in the collections of European and American museums including the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago and the MoMA in New York.

Other European Artists
Raoul Dufy
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Edgar Hunt
David Hockney
Paul Delvaux
Rene Magritte

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Jean Dufy.

Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968)

Kees van Dongen was born Cornelis Theodorus Marie van Dongen in Delfshaven, Holland on January 26, 1877. In 1892, at the age of 16, van Dongen began studies at the Akademie voorBeeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. While studying at the academy, he worked as an illustrator and sketch artist for the newspaper Rotterdam Nieuwsbald. During this time, he frequented the Red Quarter seaport area, where he drew scenes of sailors and prostitutes.

In December 1899, he returned to Paris to join Augusta Preitinger, whom he met at the Academy. The two married on July 11, 1901, but later divorced in 1921.

In 1905, his works were exhibited at the Salon des Independents and the Salon d’Automne, along with artists Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and Andrew Derain. This group of artists became known as the fauves (wild beasts), for their strong use of bright colors. During this time, van Dongen became friends with Pablo Picasso. He became a member of the German Expressionist group “Die Brücke”, with whom he exhibited in 1908.

Throughout the 1930s and 40s van Dongen continued to paint portraits of the upper class, landscapes and create book illustrations. He met his second wife Marie-Claire Huguen during this time, who helped him regain interest in the art scene. Kees van Dongen was banned from the Saon d’Automne for one year after World War II because of a Nazi propaganda trip he took in 1941.

Kees van Dongen was awarded the Legion of Honour, the Order of the Crown of Belgium. Two of his works were admitted to the Musee du Luxembourg. He also wrote a biography about Rembrandt, in which he intertwined his own life.

Kees van Dongen died at his home in Monet Carlo on May 28, 1968.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Kees Van Dongen.

Moise (Maurice) Kisling (1891-1953)

Moise Kisling was born in Kracow, Poland in 1891. He showed artistic talent as a child and was a gifted draughtsman. His family encouraged him to become an engineer. At fifteen, he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Krakow, where an influential teacher and admirer of Renoir and the French Impressionists, encouraged him to go to Paris.

In 1910, Kisling went to Paris and settled at Montparnasse, where he became part of the artistic community referred to as the School of Paris, which included such artists as Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob and André Salmon. Moise Kisling’s art of the time incorporates French characteristics with ideas from non-French painters. Fellow artists and friends, Andre Derain, Amedeo Modigliani and Marc Chagall, strongly influenced Moise Kisling’s style and use of color. In 1911-1912, he lives in Céret near Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris and the poet Max Jacob. While there he painted landscapes inspired by Cézanne. In 1913, he moved back to Paris and set up a studio in Montparnasse, where he lived and worked for 27 years.

When World War I started, he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, but was badly wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1915, for which he was awarded French citizenship. Between 1917 and 1920 he lived in the South of France, but soon moved back to Paris. In 1919, he was given an exhibition at the Galerie Druet. Cubism soon began to influence his work. His art had dramatic form and color.

Kisling volunteered for army service again in 1940 for World War II. When the French Army surrendered to Germany, Kisling who was Jewish, moved to the United States and lived in California until 1946. His work was exhibited in New York and Washington, In 1946, he moved back to Paris. Moise Kisling died in South of France in 1953.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Moise (Maurice) Kisling.

Anders Zorn (1860-1920)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Anders Zorn.

Max Liebermann (1847-1935)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Max Liebermann.

Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Joan Miró, a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, was born in Barcelona, Spain on April 20, 1893. He began drawing classes at Carrer del Regomir 13 at the age of seven. In 1907, despite his father’s defiance, he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja. Beginning in 1912, he studied at the Barcelona Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Gali.

In 1918, at the age of 25, Miró exhibited his work at his first solo show at the Dalmau gallery. His work was ridiculed and defaced. A young Miró was inspired by Cubist and Surrealist exhibitions from abroad, and the bright colors of Fauves. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where he was influenced by poets and writers, and developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Miró was originally part of the Generation of ’27, which was made up of Spanish poets, writers, painters and film makers. They included Luis Buñuel, Miguel Hernández, José María Hinojosa and García Lorca. Buñuel, Hernández and Hinojosa were murdered by Franco during Spain’s fascist reign. Some were able to flee to France and the U.S., Miró was among this group.

Repression had a large impact on Joan Miró’s Surrealist work, as did his awareness of Haitian Voodoo art and the Cuban Santería religion. His works included playfully distorted animal and human forms, twisted organic shapes, and boldly colored gemotric constructions set against flat neutral backgrounds, and painted with mostly red, blue, green and yellow. Miró used mediums of etching and lithography, which facilitated the distribution of his artwork to a wider audience. He created various illustrations for avant-garde illustrated books.

Joan Miró’s first major museum retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. He received many awards throughout his lifetime, including the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and the Guggenheim International Award for murals for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958. Miró’s retrospectives took place at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962, and at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1974. The Musée National d’Art Moderne exhibited over five hundred of his works in a major retrospective in 1978. Today, his works are highly sought after and in the collections of major art collectors and museums.

Joan Miró died on December 25, 1989 in Palma de Mallorca. He was survived by his wife Pilar and daughter Dolores.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Joan Miro.

William Penhallow Henderson (1877-1943)

William Penhallow Henderson, an American painter, architect and furniture designer, was born in 1877 in Medford, Massachusetts. His childhood was unstable, moving various times to follow his father as he changed jobs. Henderson spent time on a cattle ranch in Texas, which spurred his interest in the Southwest. In high school he studied art, civil engineering and comparative religion.

Henderson studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. In 1899, he went on to study at the Boston Museum School under Edmund Tarbell, who trained Henderson in the mechanical aspects of academic painting, and instilled in him the technical principals of European masters. William Penhallow Henderson received the Paige Traveling Scholarship, which allowed him to study in Europe, where he explored museums and galleries, studying both Old Masters as well as contemporaries of his time. Henderson was particularly inspired by Velasquez, who he spent much time copying. He also produced his own sketches and paintings during this time as well.

After studying in Europe, William Penhallow Henderson taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago from 1904 to 1910. He completed ten murals for the Joliet Township High School between 1906 and 1907. Henderson designed and built a house and studio at lake Bluff, Illinois, and in the same year was commissioned by Frank Lloyd Wright to design murals for Midway Gardens in Chicago. The murals were painted over shortly after completion. William Penhallow Henderson also designed scenery and costumes for the Chicago Fine Arts Theatre production of Alice in Wonderland. He was employed by the U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation in San Francisco to paint camouflage onto the hulls of ships during World War I. In 1925, Henderson formed the Pueblo-Spanish Building Company, turning to architecture and decorative arts. This led to the design and building of many private homes and some public buildings. Henderson was also successful in designing carved wooden furniture. He illustrated two books written by his wife, Alice Corbin Henderson: Spinning Woman of the Sky in 1912, and Brothers of Light: the Penitentes of the Southwest in 1937. In the mid-1930s, Henderson was appointed to the Federal Arts Project, completing easel paintings and six murals for the Santa Fe Federal Court Building. In 1937, he designed the Navajo House of Religion in Santa Fe in the style of Navajo Hogan.

William Penhallow Henderson’s paintings are included in many museum collections including the Denver Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, Johnson Gallery of the University of New Mexico, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Henderson died in 1943 in Tesuque, New Mexico.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by William Penhallow Henderson.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Martin Johnson Heade.

Bernard Buffet (1928-1999)

Bernard Buffet was born in Paris in 1928 and studied art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1944. By 1947, he had his first exhibition at the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, but the exhibit was not viewed favorably. The following year however, he received the “Prix de la Critique” award from the Paris art critics, establishing himself in the art community and his works become highly sought-after. Also in 1948, the Paris gallery David et Garnier began to show his work annually. His subjects in these early days were comprised of Parisian landscapes and cityscapes, flowers and ships. Bernard Buffet soon became a member of the artist group “L’ homme témoin” and worked in a Neo-Realist style incorporating dark lines, that lend drama to his compositions.

In 1955, he was awarded first prize by the magazine Connaissance des arts that named the 10 best post-war artists. This brought Buffet enormous fame and wealth and he became well known throughout France, Japan and the United States. He was also able to exhibit extensively as a result of the award. By 1958, the Galerie Charpentier holds a retrospective of his work. He is only 30 years old.

During the 1960s however, Buffet’s reputation in France is under attack. It is believed that Picasso became resentful of Bernard Buffet’s instant fame and high regard throughout influential art circles. Picasso began a campaign of slander and denigration within these circles. Another enemy to Buffet was Andre Malraux, who may have been a friend of Picasso and was the Minister of Culture in 1959. Malraux was focused on regaining the position of art center of the world for Paris, since New York had taken away the title years before. Buffet’s work did not fit into his vision. Malraux was interested in promoting the French abstract artists working at the time to accomplish his mission and Buffet’s fame was problematic. However, Bernard Buffet’s work continued to sell well with French collectors and outside of France as well, but his talent was dismissed within the cultural communities of his home country.

By the 1970’s, his situation was beginning to ease somewhat and in 1971, he was named Knight of the Honorary Legion. In 1973, the Bernard-Buffet-Museum opened in Surugadaira, Japan, spearheaded by the collector Kiichiro Okano. The following year he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1978, he was commissioned to design a stamp depicting l’Institut et le Pont des Arts.

In the years to follow, Bernard Buffet was diagnosed with Parkinson disease and eventually was unable to paint. He committed suicide in Tourtour, France where he was living in 1999. He was a prolific painter who created more than 8,000 paintings and whose prints were a common fixture in many homes during the 1960s. He achieved immediate success and fame in a time when Europe was busy picking up the pieces of World War II. He is one of few painters that fell from favor in their home country, but maintained it worldwide throughout their careers. Today, a new generation curators and collectors are viewing Bernard Buffet’s work with open eyes and his status within France’s art establishment is restored. A retrospective of more than 60 canvases was held at the Musée de la Vielle Charité in Marseilles in 2009.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Bernard Buffet.

Fernando Botero (b.1932)

Fernando Botero Angulo was born in 1932 in Medellín, Antioquia, in the mountains of Colombia. His father, a salesman, died when Botero was four years old. An uncle stepped in and became an influential presence in his life. His uncle encouraged his education and sent him to a school for matadors for several years. He began painting as teenager. Early in his life, Botero had no exposure to museums and other cultural institutes, but he was able to absorb the aesthetic of the Baroque style colonial churches and pre-Columbian and Spanish art that he could see in the city he lived in. He was exposed to the works of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. At 16, Botero created and published illustrations for the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano daily paper and was able to attend high school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia with the money he earned.

Fernando Botero’s paintings were first exhibited in 1948, and two years later, in Bogotá, he had his first solo show held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá. In 1952, Botero went with a group of artists to Barcelona and soon after moved to Madrid. Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, and spent a lot time in the Prado Museum, studying the works Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez. By 1953, he moved to Paris and studied the collections in the Louvre, and then moved to Florence where he was focused his attentions on studying the Renaissance masters. He studied the technique of fresco painting and copied works of Giotto and Anrea del Castagno. Throughout the 1950s, Botero began to first experiment with elements of proportion and size in his work.

When he moved to New York City in 1960, Fernando Botero had developed the style he has become known for in his work depicting inflated human and animal shapes. His early work references Latin-American folk art and has a smooth finish without the appearance of brushwork and texture. His subjects include bordello scenes and nudes, with a comic quality, and portraits of families. Shortly after moving to New York, he won the Guggenheim National Prize for Colombia. In 1966, Fernando Botero had his first important European exhibition at the ‘Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden’, and then exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Center in December, which was important in helping become established in the United States.

In 1973, Fernando Botero returned to Paris. It was at this time that he started creating sculptures which incorporate the same style and concerns of his painting. At this point in his career, his subjects are primarily portraits, still-life and animals. However, in 2004 Botero began working with more political subjects and wanted to draw attention to important issues of the world. One such series, centered around this theme, exhibited a series about the violence in Colombia from the drug cartels. He exhibited 27 drawings and 23 paintings dealing with this subject at the National Museum of Colombia. These pieces were also donated to the museum.

In 2005, the Abu Ghraib series, based on the United States forces’ abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War, received critical acclaim and was first exhibited in Europe. The series included more than 85 paintings and 100 drawings. In 2007, the series was shown in the US and again Fernando Botero donated the entire series to museums. Having devoted so much of himself to this series and difficult subject matter, Botero returned to the subjects of his earlier works, focusing on themes of family. In 2008, he exhibited a body of work entitled The Circus, which was made up of 20 works in oil and watercolor.

Today Botero’s works are still exhibited in numerous international museums and exhibitions. Fernando Botero lives and works in New York and Paris. He spends one month a year in Colombia, but considers himself the “most Colombian artist living”. He has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars. Many believe he is one of the most important artists working today.

Link
Interview with Fernando Botero on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmfxQ_PZUYo

Fernando Botero’s “Abu Ghraib” - A Conversation with the artist
US Berkley Lecture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGIa-9vCSto&feature=related

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Fernando Botero.

Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004)

Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati in 1931. He attended Hiram College and transferred to the University of Cincinnati to study psychology. In 1952, his education was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. While in the army, he began creating cartoons. After his service, he returned to the University of Cincinnati and completed his psychology degree and then went to the Art Academy of Cincinnati to study drawing. He continued to draw cartoons and had his first strip published. At this stage, Tom Wesselmann knew he would pursue a career in art and moved to New York and enrolled at the Cooper Union Art School. In New York, he was exposed to inspiring artists, such as Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. Wesselmann experimented with many styles of art. Early works were abstract expressionism and collage.

After graduating from the Cooper Union Art School, Wesselmann founded the Judson Gallery, along with fellow artists Marc Ratliff and Jim Dine. He also taught art in a Brooklyn school, and then at the High School of Art and Design.
In 1961, Tom Wesselmann began his well known series ‘Great American Nudes’ and exhibited it in his first solo show in New York. The series was inspired by a dream and incorporated patriotic representational images, such as American landscapes and the founding fathers. He was offered shows at the Tanager Gallery and the Green Gallery. His work of the time was now being placed in the new genre of Pop Art.

Curator, Art Historian and Critic, Henry Geldzahler observed: “About a year and a half ago I saw the works of Wesselmann…, Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein in their studios. They were working independently, unaware of each other, but drawing on a common source of imagination. In the space of a year and a half they put on exhibitions, created a movement and we are now here discussing the matter in a conference. This is instant history of art, a history of art that became so aware of itself as to make a leap that went beyond art itself”.

Being described as a Pop Artist was not something Wesselmann agreed with and stated, “I dislike labels in general and ‘Pop’ in particular, especially because it overemphasizes the material used. There does seem to be a tendency to use similar materials and images, but the different ways they are used denies any kind of group intention”.

In 1962, he exhibited in the ‘New Realists’ show at the Sidney Janis Gallery. The same year he began experimenting with assemblages and started a new series called ‘Still Life’. The next series he worked on was ‘Bathtub Collages’ followed by ‘Bedroom Paintings’, ‘Seascapes’ and ‘Smokers’, which he continued until the early 1980s. In 1980, he published a treatise, under the pen-name Slim Stealingworth, examining his artistic development. In 1984, he started making steel and aluminum cut-out figures. In later years, his metal work became more abstract. In 1994 a comprehensive retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen.

By the mid 1990s, Tom Wesselmann’s health began to decline as a result of heart disease, although he continued work.
Wesselmann died in New York in 2004 following heart surgery. His work is part of the permanent collections of museums all over the world.

Links
Tom Wesselmann Draws willl be on view at The Kreeger Museum from April 8-July 30, 2011.
http://www.kreegermuseum.org/programs/exhibitions.asp

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Tom Wesselmann.

Stephen Scott Young (b.1957)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Stephen Scott Young.

Dean Cornwell (1892-1960)

Dean Cornwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1892. Cornwell’s parents encouraged his drawing and his mother taught him to observe and appreciate nature, which was later reflected in his illustrations of natural history. As a child, poor vision almost ended his dreams of a career in art, but once he was fitted with glasses his vision improved enough to keep drawing. He was given art lessons and soon had his first drawing published on the children’s page of The Courier Journal. One of his first jobs was drawing cartoons of visiting musical shows for The Louisville Herald, where he was eventually offered a full time position.

In 1911, Cornwell moved to Chicago and attended classes at the Chicago Art Institute. He earned money by doing newspaper work and by painting scenery for window displays. Later, he was hired as a staff artist and illustrator for the Sunday feature page at the Chicago Tribune. Soon, Cornwell was promoted to top newspaper illustrator. His first magazine commission came when the editor at Redbook Magazine gave him three illustrations slots for the November 1914 issue.

In 1915, Dean Cornwell moved to New York and enrolled in the Art Student’s League. Here he met Harvey Dunn, who invited him to participate in a summer school course that he and Charles Chapman were conducting in Leonia, New Jersey. Dunn’s summer course taught the basic principles and beliefs of Howard Pyle, who founded the Brandywine School of Illustration and inspired students with idealism and a sense of mission for their artwork. During this summer, Cornwell absorbed Dunn’s philosophy of painting and studied the effects of light on form and tonal values. He would use these lighting techniques in his future work. Upon returning to New York, Dean Cornwell began to receive regular commissions for Redbook short stories and Saturday Evening Post.

In 1919 and 1921, Cornwell won first prize for his illustrations of the Wilmington Society of Fine Arts. In 1922, he won the Chicago Art Institute’s Award of Merit and was elected president of the Society of Illustrators. During the 1920’s, his style evolved and he began to work in a more dynamic, less atmospheric style, which earned him the reputation as “Dean of Illustrators.” In 1929, Cornwell signed a contract with Hearst Publications which set out generous rates for his work. However, at the height of his fame as an illustrator, Cornwell wanted to expand his artistic creation and found mural painting. He painted murals for the Los Angeles Public Library, the Lincoln Memorial Shrine in Redlands, California, Raleigh Room of the Warwick Hotel in New York City and for the General Motors exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. He also traveled to London to complete the murals in Brangwyn’s studio and worked on them there for three years. Over his career he painted historic murals in over 20 public buildings across the United States.

Dean Cornwell was celebrated and well-known during his lifetime. His paintings have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Pratt Institute, the Art Center of New York City, and the National Academy of Design. Cornwell was an illustrator who tried to find a meaningful role in a world constantly changing with technology. In 1960, Cornwell ruptured a main artery and died. He was 68 years old.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Dean Cornwell.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)

Grace Hartigan was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1922. She was the oldest of four children and created art as a teenager. She was unable to attend a traditional college, but did attend Newark College of Engineering at night and was eventually able to work as a draughtsman. She did study art briefly with Professor Issac Muse, but is basically self-taught. Grace Hartigan married very young and had a child. On a romantic whim, she and her husband headed for Alaska to live as pioneers, but only made it as far as California, where, with her husband’s encouragement, she began painting. In 1940, she left her husband and child and moved back to Newark.

Hartigan moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1945 and became part of the postwar New York artistic scene, forming alliances with the Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and others. Her first paintings were influenced greatly by de Kooning and Pollock. In 1950, she was selected for the New Talent exhibition by the famous Art Critic, Clement Greenberg and Art Historian Meyer Shapiro. Her first solo show was held in the following year at Tibor DeNagy Gallery. She became known as a brilliant colorist and for being a central member of the New York School. Shortly after, her painting entitled “Persian Jacket,” was purchased for the Museum of Modern Art by Alfred Barr.

Living in New York, Hartigan enjoyed studying the masters, and made several paintings after some classics. Moreover, she observed daily life on the city streets, and began incorporating it directly into her work. Her early work was purely abstract and heavily influenced by Pollack and de Kooning, but she gradually introduced images into her work. In 1952, Hartigan began incorporating into her paintings recognizable items and characters from the media. The work during this time is considered a precursor to Pop Art. She continued to use figuration and abstraction throughout her long career.
Hartigan said she was always interested in “the face the world puts on to sell itself to the world.” She also collaborated with several poets such as Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch to become more engrained in the New York artistic community. She began to create her own mythology through subject matter. In the early 1960s, she explored how to visually communicate ideas about nature and Classical goddesses through paintings. Examples of this exploration can been seen in her “Pallas-Athena” series. Her interest in the sublime and in spiritual matters would increase in coming years.

Grace Hartigan believed that painting must have “content and emotion”. Even though her paintings had pop tendencies, she disliked the idea of mass manufacturing that Pop Art glorified. Her work suffered critically when Pop Art and Minimalism became popular, and she moved to Baltimore to escape the current painting trends and continue on her own creative path of expression. After she left New York, Hartigan began teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The college created a graduate school around her, the Hoffberger School of Painting, of which she became director in 1965. She continued to work and paint there until 2007. Grace Hartigan passed away in 2008.
The notion of impulse was of primary concern her paintings, which exhibit confidence and commitment to the creative process. Hartigan considered the creative process as intuitively linked to mysticism. Her styles varied widely but she consistently experimented with vibrant palette as a means to express diverse emotions. Like de Kooning’s paintings, one critic noted, Hartigan’s paintings can be both “romantic and vulgar.” She once said about herself “I didn’t have talent, I just had genius”.

Similar Artists
Gerald Harvey
William Robinson Leigh
Dean Cornwell
Guy Carleton Wiggins
John Whorf
Childe Hassam
Gil Gilette Elvgren
Sven Birger Sandzen
John George Brown
Carl Rungius
Robert Alan Bechtle
Roland Petersen
Walter Launt Palmer

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Grace Hartigan.

Available for Purchase
(click artwork for details)

Richard Estes (b.1932)

Richard Estes was born in Kewanee, Illinois in 1932. He studied fine arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to 1956. He found himself inspired by realist painters such as Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, and Thomas Eakins. After school, Estes moved to New York City and worked as a graphic artist with magazine publishers and advertising agencies for 10 years. He also spent time living and working in Spain. By 1966, Richard Estes was able to focus solely on painting.

Up to this point in Richard Estes career, his work was comprised of super-realistic and detailed city scenes and people going about their everyday life. By 1967, humans were removed from his images and subjects became storefronts and buildings with strong emphasis on the reflections in glass, automobiles and chrome. Richard Estes captures typical scenes found in cities, including scenes of Chicago, Paris, Venice, San Francisco, Prague, Barcelona, London and Florence. His work of New York City is where he focused the most attention and is perhaps what he is best known for.

Estes is considered as one of the founders of Photorealism movement, which includes other such artists as Chuck Close and Duane Hanson. Estes prefers to be considered as simply a painter. In the 1960s, he began to use a camera to record the details of a scene. For compositional purposes, he does alter the scenes and could use several photographs to create a single painting as to not be limited to copying a photograph.

In 1968, the Allan Stone Gallery gave Richard Estes his first of many solo exhibitions. In 1971, Richard was granted a National Council for the Arts fellowship. His work continues to be exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world.

Select public collections

• Académie Francaise, Paris, France
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, United States
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., United States
• Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., United States
• Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, United States
• Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art, Teheran, Iran
• The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, United States
• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, United States
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, United States

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Richard Estes.

John James Audubon (1785-1851)

John James Audubon, a French-American ornithologist, naturalist and painter, was born on April 26, 1785 in Les Cayes in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). He was notable for his expansive studies to document all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats. He identified 25 new species and a number of new sub-species.

John James Audubon was the illegitimate son of French naval officer, Lieutenant Jean Audubon and his mistress Jeanne Rabin, a chambermaid from France. At the age of 4, Audubon traveled to France where he was educated among the upper classes. At the age of 15 he was drawing French birds, and by age 17, he was studying drawing in Paris. In 1823 Audubon took lessons in oil painting technique from John Steen, a teacher of American landscape, and history painter Thomas Cole.

Audubon made his goal the publication of an anthology of bird drawings, and financing his way with portraiture, he traveled the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and Great Lakes, settling in New Orleans. He was unable to find a publisher in the United States, so he traveled to London where he stayed from 1826 to 1831. Here he used William Lizars and Robert Havell, Jr. as engravers; however the association with Lizars ended in 1827.

In 1839, he finished a four volume series of life-sized bird portraits, The Birds of America. The plates were published between 1827 and 1838, and the accompanying letterpress,Ornithological Biography, was completed in 1839.

Reverend John Bachman became a close friend and important ally in helping Audubon establish a reputation as a credible naturalist. From 1845 to 1848, John Audubon’s second series, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, was published in three volumes. The text was written by Bachman.

John Audubon developed his own method for drawing birds. First, he killed them using fine shot, then used wires to prop them into a natural position. This was unlike the common method of many ornithologists, who prepared and stuffed the birds into a rigid pose. His paintings are set true-to-life in the birds’ natural habitat, and are all draw life size. He often portrayed them as if caught in motion, especially feeding or hunting. Audubon worked primarily with watercolor early on. He used colored chalk or pastel to add softness to the feathers. He employed multiple layers of watercolor, and sometimes used gouache.

He died on January 27, 1851. Audubon is buried in the graveyard at the Church of the Intercession in the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum at 155th Street and Broadway in New York City.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by John James Audubon.

Mel Ramos (b.1935)

Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento, California in 1935. In 1954, he began studying art and art history at Sacramento Junior College. He then went on to California State University and studied under Wayne Thiebaud, who’s realistic style, everyday objects as subjects and bold color pallet must have heavily influenced Ramos. The early works by Mel Ramos were inspired by comic books of the 1960s. He explains “I was attracted to comics back then, because of the eroticism before the Comics Code was imposed. After that, comic books got kind of boring. The drawings in those early comics books of Sheena and all those sexy comic queens, that’s what attracted me. Originally, I was just doing comic book images the way they appeared and then I decided I wanted to make them look more realistic, so I started adding the faces of celebrities, which I still do.”

Ramos’ nudes in the 1960s were first noticed by collectors at the same time pin-up artists Gil Elvgren and Earl Moran were a popular part of American culture through calendars and advertising. While Ramos appreciates these pin-up artists and owns an Elvgren, he has said that in those days he was inspired by Spanish painters, such as Joaquin Sorolla, and Diego Velasquez.

As his style developed, he began incorporating recognizable brands into his paintings along with the nudes. Like other Pop Artists of the time, Mel Ramos was making a statement about aspects of popular culture as represented in mass media. It was at this time that Ramos was established as one of the leading artists in the Pop Art Movement. His work was part of the exhibition “Pop Goes the East” at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston in 1963. Throughout the rest of his career and still today, he has had numerous solo and group gallery shows worldwide. His work has also been show in museums, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum and The MontrŽal Museum of Fine Art to name a few.

After holding several teaching positions throughout his career, Mel Ramos accepted a chair position at California State University in Hayward in 1980. He also began to paint self portraits and landscape. By 1986, Ramos is awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant and a United States/France Exchange Fellowship. Since 1992, he has lived in California and Spain. His work has been controversial over the years, but he has secured an important place in American art history.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Mel Ramos.

Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925)

Willard Leroy Metcalf, an American artist, was born on July 1, 1858 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is best known for scenes of the hills and countryside of New England in which he merged a realist and an Impressionist approach.

Metcalf‘s early studies consisted of classes at the Massachusetts Normal School in 1874, and at the Lowell Institute in 1875. Also in 1875, he was an apprentice to the landscape painter George Loring Brown. He received a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (later known as the Boston Museum School) until 1878. Here, he studied under William Rimmer.
In 1881, Willard Leroy Metcalf received an illustration commission for the Southwest for Harper’s. He accompanied journalist Sylvester Baxter to illustrate his article on the Zuni Indians. Later in 1881, he met and painted ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing.

By 1883, Metcalf had saved up enough money to study in France at the Académie Julian, Paris. Here he studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. Metcalf visited North Africa in late 1886 and early 1887, where he painted scenes such as Arab Encampment, Biskra, and later visited Venice.
By 1889, Willard Leroy Metcalf was back in the United States. He lived in New York, where he taught, created portraits, and produced illustrations. He was commissioned by the Havana Tobacco Company for a number of paintings of Cuba. Metcalf won the coveted Webb Prize at the Society of American Artists’ Annual Exhibition in 1896 with his painting, Gloucester Harbor. He became a member of the Ten American Painters in the follow year. In 1899, he painted two murals for the Appellate Court building in New York City. In 1903, Metcalf became a “peacmaker” in Old Lyme, Connecticut, mediating between the warring Tonalist and Impressionist camps.

Metcalf’s paintings can be found in many prominent private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; New Hampshire; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Denver Art Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée d’Art Américain, Giverny, France; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the San Diego Museum of Art, California; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland; the White House, Washington, D.C.; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Willard Leroy Metcalf died in New York City on March 9, 1925.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Willard Leroy Metcalf.

Lesser Ury (1861-1931)

Lesser Ury was born in 1861 in Prussia. After the passing of his father, the family moved to Berlin. He worked as an apprentice to a clothing merchant until he saved enough money to study art in Düsseldorf at the Kunstakademie. He traveled extensively throughout Europe for many years continuing his studies and painting. He spent time in Paris painting floral still lifes, city scenes and interiors during 1881. It is believed that he was strongly influenced by impressionist painter Degas, who painted similar subjects.

Ury was a master oil and pastel painter. Typical subjects found in his work are landscapes, rainy cityscapes and figures in café interiors. He had developed a pastel technique which enabled him to capture the air and light reflections of landscapes. Ury returned to Berlin in 1887. Other Berlin artists working at the time were united in artistic philosophy, but Lesser Ury, always an introvert, followed his own unique style and instincts.

The Fritz Gurlitt Gallery gave Ury his first show in 1889. His work received much criticism but eventually the Akademie would award him the Michael-Beer-Preis. The award provided the finances for him to continue to travel.

When he returned to Berlin in 1893, he was given a one-man show and joined the Munich Secession, a group of progressive artists from Germany and Austria. He would go on to exhibit at the Berlin Seccession in 1915 and became an honorary member six years later. In 1922, his sixtieth birthday was honored with an exhibition and featured 150 of his works. His health began to decline after a heart attack in 1928 and Lesser Ury died in 1931 in his studio in Berlin.

The German art community did not appreciate his work very late in his career. Much of his work was destroyed by the Nazi’s as were many pieces from Jewish artists. Today Lesser Ury is considered by many to be one of the most important pastel artists of the 19th Century.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Lesser Ury.

Nikolai Petrovich Belsky (1868-1945)

Nikolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky, a Russian painter, was born in the village of Shitiki in Smolensk Governorate in 1868. In 1883 Bogdanov-Belsky attended the Semyon Rachinsky fine art school. Also during that year he studied icon-painting at Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra. Bogdanov-Belsky studied modern painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1884 to 1889, and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1894 to 1895. During the late 1890s, he worked and studied in private studios in Paris.

After 1921, Bogdanov-Belsky worked exclusively in Riga, Latvia. Here he was a member of several prominent societies, including the Perdvizhniki beginning in 1895, and the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society, of which he was a founding member and chairman from 1913 to 1918, beginning in 1909. In 1903, he became a pedagogue and academician. Bogdanov-Belsky was an active member of the Academy of Arts in 1914. He was also a member of the Russian Fraternitas Arctica in Riga.

Belsky’s works were mostly genre paintings, especially the education of peasant children, portraits, and impressionistic landscape studies. Bogdanov-Belsky combined en plein-air subject matter, color and stroke into an academic framework. He combined both rural and urban subjects in many of his paintings.

Nikolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky died in 1945 in Berlin.
 

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Nikolai Petrovich Belsky.

David Hockney (b.1937)

David Hockney, an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, was born on July 9, 1937 in Bradford, England. He was an important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, and is also considered to be one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

Hockney studied at Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R.B. Kitaj. While studying at the Royal College of Art, he was featured in the Young Contemporaries exhibition, along with Peter Blake. This exhibition announced the arrival of British Pop Art. Hockney’s early work also displayed expressionist elements, some of which made references to his love for men. From 1963, he was represented by John Kasmin, an influential art dealer. After living in California for many years, David Hockney was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles using the comparatively new Acrylic medium rather than oil paint. He made increasing use of photography for purposes of documentation. These paintings were rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colors. His painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick’s Pool, won Hockney the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1967. David Hockney also made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. In 1970, Hockney had his first major retrospective exhibition; it was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

David Hockney also lectured at universities including the University of Iowa in 1964, the University of Colorado in 1965, the University of California in Los Angeles in 1966, and the University of California at Berkely in 1967. In 1973, David Hockney went to live in Paris, where he were worked with Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, Picasso’s master printers. He produced a series of etchings in memory of Picasso who had died earlier that year. Hockney’s work was exhibited in 1974 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Hockney’s easel paintings from the 1980s show the influence of Matisse and Picasso.

From 1982, David Hockney explored the use of the camera, making composite images of Polaroid photographs that were arranged in a rectangular grid. He compiled complete pictures from a series of individually photographed details. In the 1980s, Hockney worked with California master printer Ken Tyler, making etchings and lithographs. In 1986, he explored creating works with color photocopiers. Later, Hockney experimented using faxes and computers, composing images and colors on the screen and having them printed directly from the computer disk without preliminary proofing.
Major retrospectives of David Hockney’s work have been held in New York, Los Angeles and Europe. He primarily works in his Hollywood Hills studio in California, his permanent home since 1978. His work continues to be influenced by technical experimentation.

Other European Artists
Raoul Dufy
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Edgar Hunt
Jean Dufy
Paul Delvaux
Rene Magritte

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by David Hockney.

Wayne Thiebaud (b.1920)

Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, but moved to California when still a baby. As a teenager, he apprenticed at Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Studio. From 1938 to 1949, he worked as a cartoonist and designer in California and New York. His early experience working in commercial art had an influence on his later paintings. In 1949, Thiebaud studied at San Jose State College and later transferred to Sacramento State College, where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. By 1960, he was teaching at the University of California, Davis. He taught there for ten years and influenced many young artists.

Also in 1960, he exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thiebaud’s first solo exhibition was at the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento. In 1962, he met Allan Stone, who became his dealer in New York until Stone’s death. He was included in the landmark group exhibition, New Realists, at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Many site this show as the official launching of Pop Art.

While on a trip to New York, he became friends with artists Franz Kline and Willem De Kooning. Their work influenced Wayne Thiebaud as did proto pop artist Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. During this time, he began a series based on images of food displayed in windows. Emphasis was on the basic shapes of the food and he used heavy pigment and strong colors with well-defined shadows.

In 1962, Thiebaud’s works were included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Robert Dowd and Edward Ruscha, in the now historical exhibition, New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. Wayne Thiebaud was associated with Pop art because his subjects were found in mass culture, most notably paintings of production line objects found in diners and cafeterias, such as pies and pastries. He was one of the first artists to paint popular cultural and is said to have influenced the movement. In addition to food, Thiebaud also painted landscapes, streetscapes, and characters such as Mickey Mouse.

Wayne Thiebaud received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1994 and the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from the National Arts Club, New York City in 1996. He was honored by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Legion of Honor and with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Art from the American Academy of Design, New York in 2001. Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings can be found in collections at major museums across the United States including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Wayne Thiebaud.

Helen Layfield bradley (1900-1979)

Helen Layfield Bradley was born November 20, 1900, in the village of Lees, near Oldham, Lancashire, in what is now the United Kingdom.

When Bradley was in her sixties she started painting landscapes of scenes remembered from her childhood to illustrate for her grandchildren what it was like for her growing up. Her work is characterized by cityscapes, often-industrial scenes, populated by people going about their daily routines. Helen Bradley made her paintings in oil mainly using her hands and fingers. She always included a detailed description of the background for each of her paintings, along with the date and miniature black fly emblem.

Bradley first exhibited at The Saddleworth Art Society, in 1966 in London, and in 1968 at the Carter Gallery in Los Angeles, California. A series of books with her paintings was published in 1970 becoming popular in Europe, Japan, and the United States. She was posthumously awarded an M.B.E. for services to the arts in 1979 after her death on July 19th of that year.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Helen Layfield bradley.

E. Charlton Fortune (1885-1969)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by E. Charlton Fortune.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso, one of the most recognized figures of 20th century art, co-created such styles as Cubism and Surrealism, was also among most innovative, influential, and prolific artists of all time.

He was born Pablo Ruiz Picasso on October 6, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. His father was an artist and professor of art at the School of Fine Arts, and also a curator of the museum in Malaga. Picasso first studied art formally at the Academy of Arts in Madrid for a year. After Madrid, Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900 and met the journalist and poet Max Jacob. Soon they shared an apartment. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Out of necessity, many of Picasso’s pieces were burned to keep warm. Around, 1901, the artist also began to sign his work simply Picasso, instead of Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.
In 1901 Picasso’s friend Casagemas committed suicide over the rejection of a woman. His death was a great shock to Picasso. He began to use mostly blues and greens in his work. Picasso wrote “I began to paint in blue, when I realized that Casademas had died”. This marks the beginning of Picasso’s famous Blue Period (1901–1904). By 1905, Picasso lightened his palette, using pink, rose, yellow-ochre and gray. His circus performers, harlequins and acrobats also became more graceful. This marked the beginning of Picasso’s Rose Period (1904–1906) and financial success. Also in 1905, Picasso caught the eye of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein.

Constantly experimenting with his style, he was an innovator and influenced almost every art movement of the 20th century. Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with perhaps his most famous painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which was inspired by African artifacts. Formal ideas developed during this period and into the Cubist period that follows. Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed using monochrome neutral colors and breaking down subjects to their most basic shapes. Classicism and surrealism periods followed after World War I.

In 1940, Picasso applied for French citizenship, but was denied it, and remained Spanish. Protected by his fame, he was untouchable even to the Nazis in the occupied Paris. After World War II, his work returned to a “classical” style and he created the “Dove of Peace”. Picasso’s dove became the symbol of the Paris World Peace Conference in 1949. The USSR awarded Picasso the International Stalin Peace Prize twice, once in 1950 and for the second time in 1961 (by this time, the award had been renamed the International Lenin Peace Prize, as a result of destalinization).

His lifestyle was always bohemian. Picasso died while entertaining his guests at a dinner party, on April 8, 1973, in Mouglins, in southeastern France. It is reported that his last words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”

Pablo Picasso’s paintings rank among the most expensive artwork in the world, establishing a price record with $104 million sale of “Garson a la pipe” in 2004. Picasso produced over 13 thousand paintings or designs, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34 thousand book illustrations and 300 sculptures, becoming the most prolific artist ever.

Between October 8, 2010 and January 9, 2011, an exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs from the Museé National Picasso in Paris will be on display at the Seattle Art Museum. From Feb 19, 2011 to May 15, 2011, the exhibition from the Museé National Picasso will move to Richmond, VA and be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for its only appearance on the east coast of the United States.

Personal Quotes

“When I was a child, my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

“Good taste is the enemy of creativity.”

“Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?”

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

“It isn’t necessary to paint a man with a gun. An apple can be just as revolutionary.”

“You should have an idea of what it is you want to do . . . but it should be a vague idea.”

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Pablo Picasso.

David Davidovich Burliuk (1882-1967)

David Burliuk, a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, book illustrator, publicist, and author associated with Russian Futurism, was born on July 21, 1882 in Semyrotivka. He was born into a privileged class of Russian society. In 1898 Burliuk studied at the Kazan School of Fine Arts. He then went on to study in Odessa, Moscow, at the Munich Art Academy, and in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. During World War I Burliuk left Russia and traveled for four years to Siberia, Japan, and the South Seas.

David Davidovich Burliuk met poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, with whom he endorsed the Futurist Manifesto “A Box on the Ears for the Public Taste” in 1912. This demanded art for Russia that was independent of Europe and drew on Russian tradition. From 1912 to 1913, Burliuk took part in the “Blauer Reiter” in Munich, where he showed his work at the first German Autumn Salon. In 1922 he was given the opportunity of presenting Russian art at a group show at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin.
In 1922 he moved to the States and settled on Long Island. From here he continued to work as a painter and writer on art until his death in 1967.

His paintings started from a personal approach to Impressionism, and then went on to Fauvism and Neo-Primitivism. Burliuk blended traditional folk art with analytical Cubist influences during his Cubo-Futurist phase blended traditional folk art analytical Cubist influences. This period was followed by a series of Symbolist pictures informed by a philosophy of history. David Davidovich Burliuk’s work range from neo-primitive paintings to peasant life in Russia, and futurist depictions of South Sea fishermen. He developed his “radio style”, which involved symbolism, neo-primitivism, and expressionism, while living in the United States.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by David Davidovich Burliuk.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

David Park (1911-1960)

David Park was born on March 17, 1911 in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Charles Edwards Park, was an esteemed Unitarian minister at the First Church in Boston. David had one sister, and two brothers, one which was writer Edwards Park. As a child, David was determined to become an artist. Although his parents were unhappy with his decision not to achieve a proper education, David decided to accept an offer to move to California with his aunt Edith Park Truesdell.

From 1928 to 1929, Park attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, however he dropped out going on to work as a stonecutter for Robert Stackpool and for the Federal Arts Project. By 1935, he was receiving recognition as an artist. In the same year, he had his first one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Art. During this time his paintings featured musicians and dancers in a hard, dry, distorted scale. Towards the end of the decade, his painting style became increasingly Cubist.

David Park was part of the post-World War II alumnae of the California School of Fine Arts, which is now called the San Francisco Art Institute. Here he grew an interest in figurative art. Along with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, Park formed what would later be called the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Their influence may be seen in the work of artists such as Paul John Wonner, Nathan Oliveira, Manuel Neri, Henry Villierme and Joan Brown, all of who were later members of the Bay Area Figurative School. Park eventually landed at position with the Art Department at the University of California.

Artists in the Bay Area Figurative School began painting in an objective style, using abstract shapes in large space. However, they soon migrated to using the physical world and representative subjects to experiment with color, texture, shape and temperature. David Park believed that concentrating on principle and abstraction drew attention to the painter rather than the painting. He also felt that it was important to develop responses to nature.

David painted in the figurative style from 1950 to 1959, when he became ill with cancer. He started out painting from memory the things in which he saw. This included kids playing in the street, musicians, his friends, and people in their homes. However, toward the end of the decade he painted classical studio nudes and bathers in a monumental style. Park became too ill to paint with oils, and then moved on to painting with watercolors until his death.

From 1988 to 1989, David Park had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He died on September 20, 1960 at the age of 49.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by David Park.

Henri Martin (1860-1943)

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin was born in Toulouse, France in 1860. He first studied art in 1877 at the Toulouse School of the Fine Arts, under Jules Garipuy who was a student of Henry Eugéne Delacroix. Martin then moved to Paris in 1879 and with the help of a scholarship, was able to study in Jean-Paul Laurens’ studio, who was a painter and sculptor in the French Academic style. Four years later, Henri Martin was awarded his first medal at the Paris Salon.
A year later, Martin was given a scholarship to study in Italy. There he was able to see and study the works of such masters as Giotto and Masaccio. During his time in Italy, he developed his wonderful style of short and prominent brush strokes. In 1886, he had his first exhibition at the Paris Salon.

In 1889, Martin submitted a piece in the Pointillist style that earned him a gold medal. That same year he became a member of the Legion of Honour. At the 1900 World Fair, he was awarded the Grand Prize for his work. After winning the award, he met and became friends with Auguste Rodin. Martin decided to move away from Paris in 1900 to a more tranquil environment. He bought Marquayrol, a large farmhouse, where many believe he created his best work. He would live there for the rest of life.

Though Henri Martin was a Post-Impressionist painter, many critics have also associated him with the Symbolists, particularly with French symbolist painter, Puvis de Chavannes. He studied the work of the Divisionists, but did not follow their principles completely as many of his paintings are Pointillist pieces.
He died there in 1943. Today Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin’s work is part of important museum and private collections throughout the world.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Henri Martin.

Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955)

Maurice Utrillo was born as Maurice Valadon in 1883 in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. He was the illegitimate son of Suzanne Valadon, who was an artist model and later a painter. His last name of Utrillo comes from Miguel Utrillo, a friend of his mother’s. Miguel agreed to adopt Maurice, so that the boy would appear to have a father. Maurice Utrillo earliest paintings done before 1910, were still signed Maurice Valadon. When he was 27 years of age, he finally began using the name Utrillo on his work.

School was difficult for Maurice Utrillo and as an adolescent, he became an alcoholic. Utrillo was known as a drunk from the age of thirteen. His mother encouraged him to take up painting as a form of therapy. Despite the many relapses Utrillo had with alcohol, painting became an obsession. His mother worked for many years as an artist model and posed for Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. She studied their painting techniques and taught herself to paint. She passed on what she had learned to Maurice.

Although Utrillo had no real training, other than what his mother taught him, he drew inspiration from his surroundings and painted what he saw around the Montmartre. He created strange landscapes that appealed to all. His paintings inspired many artists’ styles in the way he re-evaluated reality in his work. His paintings up until 1907 were saturated with bright colors of yellow, red, turquoise and white. He was invited to participate in the 1912 Salon d’Automne and his work started to gain recognition. Also in 1912, he exhibited with his mother at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris and was offered a one year contract. From 1909 to 1914, Maurice Utrillo’s palette was confined to white and shades of gray. This period, also known as his white period, was his most highly regarded work. He used sand, plaster and lime in his paints to enhance the physical quality of walls and buildings in his cityscapes. These pieces brought Utrillo great fame and financial success.

By 1920, Maurice Utrillo had become internationally known and a legendary figure. Many critics viewed him as the century’s finest painter of urban scenes, particularly Paris. In 1928, he was made a member of the Legion of Honour. Despite his success, he continued to drink and had to be committed to several psychiatric institutions on various occasions.

Maurice Utrillo died on November 5, 1955. The first retrospective of his work was held at the 1943 Salon d’Automne. Recent paintings have sold for close to 1 million dollars. His works can be found in the museum collections of Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Royal Collection in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and many other collections.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Maurice Utrillo.

Edmund C Tarbell (1862-1938)

Edmund Charles Tarbell, an American Impressionist painter, was born on April 26, 1862 in West Groton, Massachusetts. Tarbell was a member of The Ten American Painters. His work is is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery and the National Academy of Design, among others.

During his youth, Tarbell attended drawing classes with George H. Bartlett at the Massachusetts Norman Art School. At the age of 15, he apprenticed at the Forbes Lithographic Company in Boston. In 1879, Tarbell enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he studied under Frederick Crowninshield and German expatriate painter, Otto Grundmann. In 1883, Edmund C. Tarbell continued his education in Paris, France at the Académie Julian. Here he studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Here he was exposed to academic training, which included copying Old Master paintings at the Louvre Museum, and the Impressionist movement.

In 1889, Edmund C. Tarbell assumed the position of former mentor, Otto Grundmann, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His influence on Boston painting was so pervasive that his followers were dubbed “The Tarbellites.” During this time he turned increasingly to Impressionism, specializing in colorful portrayals of genteel young women in outdoor sunlight. His 1891 painting, In the Orchard established his reputation as an important American modernist. Edmund C. Tarbell’s paintings exhibited at such prestigious Boston venues as the St. Botolphe Club and the Boston Guild of Artists. Realizing the importance of artistic and critical exposure in New York City, he subsequently exhibited at the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design.

In 1898, Tarbell was invited to join The Ten American Painters. This group consisted primarily of Impressionist-inspired artists, such as J.H. Twachtman and J.A. Weir, and was formed in reaction against the large, stylistically-diverse exhibitions of the Society of American Artists. Tarbell exhibited with the group until its disbandment in 1918.

His later works show the influence of 17th century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. These works typically portray genteel figures in Colonial Revival interiors. In 1918, Tarbell moved to Washington D.C., where he assumed the directorship of the Corcoran School of Art. While in the capitol, Tarbell created portraits of U.S. presidents Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

In 1925, Edmund C. Tarbell retired to his summer home in New Castle, New Hampshire, where he remained an active painter until his death on August 1, 1938.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Edmund C Tarbell.

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Edouard Vuillard.

Louis Valtat (1869-1952)

Louis Valtat was born in the Normandy region of France in 1869 to a wealthy family of ship owners. His father, an amateur painter, encouraged his interest in art, and at age seventeen decided on an artistic career. In 1887, he moved to Paris and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Later Valtat studied at the Académie Julian under Jules Dupré, a landscape painter of the Barbizon school. He became close friends with fellow students Albert André, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, who, at that time, were members of the Nabis movement that was heavily influenced by Paul Gauguin. While Valtat’s work was never associated with this movement, he learned the Gauguin method of painting and it would influence his works throughout his career.

After winning the Jauvin d’Attainville prize in 1890, Louis Valtat set up his own studio in Paris. In 1893, he exhibited, at the Salon of Independent, paintings of street scenes surrounding his studio. His submission of Sur Le Boulevard for this exhibition caught the attention of art critic, Felix Fénéo. Valtat’s work of this time incorporated techniques used in both Impressionism and Pointillism.

At the end of 1894, Louis Valtat collaborated with Henri Toulouse Lautrec and his friend Albert André on the set of the play Chariot de terre cuite (The Terracotta Chariot). At that time, Valtat began to suffer from tuberculosis and traveled to the South of France to recuperate. There he met a number of artists including Georges-Daniel de Monfried, a friend of Gauguin. In 1895, he visited Spain, and then returned to continue his convalescence in the South of France in Arcachon.

While in Arcachon, Valtat produced numerous paintings with intense colors, which he exhibited at the 1896 Salon of Independent Artists. These works were once again noticed by Fénéon, who mentioned them in a review in La Revue Blanche. While these intensely colored paintings reflected the spontaneity of Impressionism, he gives more definition to his shapes and objects of his compositions. Influenced by Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin, he painted large areas with vivid colors, and applied thick brushstrokes onto the canvas.

From 1898 until 1914, Louis Valtat began to spend more time in the South of France. He built a house with his wife in Anthéor and continued to meet other artists in the area, such as Auguste Renoir and Paul Signac. Inspired by the region, his color palette became more intense and was filled with red and blues. Between 1900 and 1905, Valtat visited Renoir home and collaborated on several works. He also continued to travel throughout France and visited Italy and Algeria.

Renoir introduced Valtat’s works to Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer. Vollard became Valtat’s agent from 1900 to 1912. He organized Valtat’s first one-man exhibition at his gallery and submitted Valtat’s works to other exhibitions in Paris. In 1905, Valtat’s paintings were shown at the Salon d’Autumne, the exhibition in which journalist Louis Vauxcelles used the term Fauves (“Wild Beasts”) to describe the artists. The exhibition caused a scandal, and some journalists dubbed this new approach as “color madness,” and “pictorial aberration.”

In 1914, Louis Valtat left Anthéor and resided in Paris again. However, after ten years he bought a house with a garden in Choisel. His garden became a prominent subject for his paintings and his compositions became calmer while still using an intense color palette.

In 1927, Louis Valtat was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor), which was considered the premier order of France. Throughout his career, Valtat remained true to his unique style and was never completely associated with a particular art movement, but was influenced by many. After the occupation of France, Valtat rarely left his studio due to failing health. He suffered from glaucoma and went blind in 1948, and after becoming ill, Valtat died in 1952 in Paris.

Louis Valtat works can be seen in the following museums: Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (Russia); Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse, Musée des Beaux Art, Bordeaux (France); Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (US); Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (Spain)

“Valtat belongs to a generation of artists in between the Impressionists and post 1900 revolutionaries. It could have been said about him that he represents the indispensable link that accounts for the transition from Monet to Matisse.”

Quoted by Georges Peillex in the text for the supplement of the exhibition catalog entitled Louis Valtat; Retrospective Centenaire (1869-1968), Genève: Petit Palais, 1969.

Other Impressionist Artists
Roland Petersen
Raoul Dufy
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Lin Fengmiam
Joseph Henry Sharp
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey
Carl Rungius

Links
The Friends of Louis Valtat
http://www.valtat.com

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Louis Valtat.

Available for Purchase
(click artwork for details)

Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953)

Joseph Henry Sharp was born in Bridgeport, Ohio in 1859. As a child, he almost drowned while swimming, but was resuscitated by his mother. Unfortunately, the accident damaged his hearing and he would eventually become completely deaf. At the age of twelve his father passed away and he began working to support his family. A few years later, at age 14, he moved to Cincinnati and lived with an aunt. There he was able to earn enough money to support himself and his mother. He also began to study art. Sharp had saved enough money to enroll at the McMicken School of Design, and later the Cincinnati Art Academy. While his loss of hearing made finishing his traditional schooling impossible, with the use of pad and pencil and the ability to read lips, he thrived in art school.

In 1881 and at the age of 24, Joseph Henry Sharp was able to travel to Europe and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. After returning to the U.S in 1883, he made his first trip west. There he visited pueblos in New Mexico, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Tucson, and began sketching members of American Indian tribes. J. H. Sharp still wanted to continue with his studies, so he returned to Europe. He went to Germany and Italy, but spent most of his time in Spain. He enjoyed studying Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya.

In 1892, Sharp came back to Cincinnati and began teaching at the Cincinnati Art Academy. He would continue teaching there until 1902. He earned additional money by painting portraits of Cincinnati society. In 1893, he traveled to Taos, New Mexico with a commission for Harper’s Weekly to illustrate Indian life. During this trip, he became interested in the purity of life and culture of the Taos Indians. His illustrations were a success and led to more commissions from many other publications.

Joseph Henry Sharp also spent time in Montana, on the battlefield of Little Big Horn. There he painted scenes of native life and portraits of the Plains tribes, including the Crow, Sioux, and Nez Perce. These paintings helped Sharp receive recognition for his work and in 1900 were exhibited in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian purchased eleven portraits. The exhibition also caught the eye of President Roosevelt, who took an interest in him and arranged for the Indian Commission to build a cabin at Little Big Horn in Montana for him to live and work. Sharp named it “Absarokee Hut” and designed it himself. The cabin was furnished in an Arts and Crafts style and decorated with Sharp’s collection of Indian artifacts, which included Navajo rugs, a buffalo robe, pottery, and baskets. These artifacts from Sharp’s collection often appear in his paintings. The cabin was featured in The Craftsman magazine.

Two years later, Phoebe Apperson Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst), purchased eighty paintings, putting him in a financial position to focus solely on painting. Hearst later commissioned an additional 75 portraits representing every major Plains tribe. Her collection of Sharp’s work was donated to the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1909, Sharp purchased a former Penitente chapel in Taos for use as a studio and moved there permanently in 1912. In 1915, along with E. Irving Couse, Oscar E. Berninghaus, Ernest L. Blumenschein, W. Herbert Dunton, Bert Geer Phillips, he became one of the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists. While in Taos, it was important for Sharp to know his subjects well and truly capture their features. J. H. Sharp viewed himself as a historian as well as painter and recognized that these tribes and their way of life would soon come to an end. He was a storyteller with his paintings. He often sketched outdoors and would finish his paintings in the studio.

In 1949, The Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa, Oklahoma) held a retrospective of Sharp’s work. The Museum holds the largest collection of Sharp’s work today.
At the age of 93, Joseph Henry Sharp moved to California, where he became ill and died in 1953. He helped to record a way of life that was changing and is now gone.

Other Impressionist Artists
Roland Petersen
Raoul Dufy
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Lin Fengmiam
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey
Carl Rungius

Further Info
http://www.jhsharp.com/western-art-collector-1.html
Western Art Collector
October 2007

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Joseph Henry Sharp.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

Alberto Vargas (1896-1982)

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez, known as Ablerto Vargas, was born in Arequipa, Peru on 9 February 1896. He was the son of famous Peruvian photographer Max T. Vargas. Alberto Vargas was a noted painter of pin-up girls. His paintings were typically a combination of watercolor and airbrush. Vargas had the ability to paint an idealized female form that was glorified but never vulgarized. His paintings were about sensuality and seduction; however the sex was never blatant.

While on a trip to Europe with his father and brother, Alberto found inspiration from Ingres and Raphael Kirchner in Paris. Kirchner was a premier artist for La Vie Parisienne. Vargas was influenced by Kirchner’s technique and approach to the female figure.

In 1916, Vargas was summoned to England to begin an apprenticeship with a major English photography house. However, World War I was taking place during that time, and he found it impossible to get from Paris to London. It was feasible however to get to America and then Peru. Alberto wound up staying in New York rather than returning home. He found work retouching photographs, drawing and painting.

In 1919, Alberto Vargas became the primary artist for Ziegfeld Follies. He remained in this position for 12 years, where he painted portraits of Broadway stars. After ending his run at Ziegfeld, Vargas was hired by Esquire to replace George Petty, another well-known pin-up artist of the time. The United States Postal Service attempted to take away Esquire’s second-class mailing permit in the 1940s. They objected, most especially, to Vargas’ pin-up art. Esquire prevailed in the case that went to the Supreme Court; however, Esquire dropped the cartoons just to be safe. A legal dispute with Esquire over the name “Varga” resulted in a judgment against Alberto Vargas. He struggled financially until his he began working for Playboy.

In 1958, he returned home to Peru for a break from his commercial artist career. Vargas spent this time perfecting his technique and fine-tuning his skills.

In 1960, Alberto Vargas was hired by Hugh Hefner to paint foldout nudes for Playboy magazine. His career with Playboy finally gave him the respect and financial security he merited. He worked for Playboy for 16 years, producing 152 paintings, called the “Vargas Girls.” His career flourished after this period, and he exhibited his work all over the world.

In 1974, the death of Vargas’ wife Anna Mae left him devastated and he stopped painting. His autobiography was published in 1978, which renewed his interest in painting and brought him partially out of his self-imposed retirement to complete a few works. These included album covers for Bernadette Peters and The Cars.

Many of Vargas’ paintings from his Esquire period are now held by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

Alberto Vargas died of a stroke on December 30, 1982 at the age of 86.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Alberto Vargas.

Alice Neel (1900-1984)

Alice Hartley Neel was born in Pennsylvania in 1900. She first studied art by taking classes at night at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, after working in a clerical position by day. In 1921, she focused on art studies full time at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. The work she did there was recognized with numerous awards. In 1924, she took outdoor painting and portrait classes through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and met her future husband, Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez.

The 1920s and 30s were full of personal tragedy and hardship. In 1926, Alice and Carlos move to Havana, Cuba and soon had their first child, Santillana. In Havana, Neel embraces the Cuban avant-garde made up of young writers, artists and musicians. The experience helped develop her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality for woman, artists and African Americans. Alice and Carlos lost their first child and shortly after having her second child, Carlos left Alice and took the child with him. Having lost her husband and essentially two children, Neel had a serious nervous breakdown and attempted suicide twice. Alice and Carlos never divorced, but would see each other for the last time in 1934
.
In the 30s, Alice Neel lived in New York. Twice, large amounts of work were destroyed. First by a angry boyfriend who burned more than three hundred drawings and watercolors and slashes more than fifty oil paintings. The second was when the Work Progress Administration program ended and the many works she produced while in the program was sold for scrap canvas. Neel moved to Spanish Harlem, New York in 1938 and would continue to live there until the 1960s. There she painted the Puerto Rican community, friends and people she saw on the street. Throughout her career, Neel painted portraits of people in her own life. She referred to her work as “pictures of people” to set herself apart from male-dominated traditional portraiture. By mid- 1940s, Alice Neel was more established as an artist and had a good circle of friends made up of intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. Her portraits during this time are of left wing writers and artists and are included in gallery shows in New York. She also created illustrations for Masses & Mainstream, a Communist publication.

In the 1950s and 60s, Alice Neel became more involved with the Woman’s Rights Movement. She participates in several protests against museums lack of inclusion of women and African American artists in their exhibitions. She would later become an icon of the women’s movement and be recognized with the International Women’s Year Award for her work and dedication. She continues to exhibit and paints portraits of artists, including Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson, curators, gallery owners and political personalities. Interest in Neel’s work continues to grow and she is able to exhibit in group and solo gallery shows more frequently. In 1963, she receives the Longview Foundation Purchase Award from Dillard University, New Orleans.

In the 1970s, Alice Neel painted portraits of her family as well as a major series of nudes. She exhibited extensively throughout the mid 1970s and in 1974 a retrospective exhibition of her life work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York was held. This was a great achievement for her personally as a woman artist. She had fought for many years to create more opportunities for women artist to be more widely accepted by the museum establishments. She was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters) and received the National Women’s Caucus for Art Award for outstanding achievement in the visual arts in 1979. She died in 1984 of cancer.

Alice Neel was one of the pioneer artists of the twentieth century. Her paintings reflect her dedication to social realism, but they also describe her life and socially turbulent world in which she lived.

For more information about this Alice Neel please visit http://www.aliceneel.com.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Alice Neel.

Earl Steffa Moran (1893-1984)

Earl Steffa Moran was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa in 1893. He first studied art under John Stich, a German artist who also taught illustrator W.H.D. Koerner. As a child, Moran was influenced by the work of Charles Dana Gibson, the creator of the famous Gibson Girls and illustrator James M. Flagg, who was known for his propaganda posters. He went on to study drawing at the Chicago Art Institute and at the Art Students’ League in New York City, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1931, he had a studio in Chicago where he focused on photography and illustrations. He created some illustrations of bathing beauties that he sent to Brown and Bigelow. By 1932, he signed an exclusive agreement with them and his fame as a calendar pinup illustrator was rising. By 1937, millions of calendars sold featuring his work. Life magazine featured Earl Moran in an article called “Speaking of Pictures” in 1940 and gave him celebrity status. In 1941, Moran helped Robert Harrison, a publisher of a gossip magazine, launch his first “risqué” magazine called Beauty Parade and continued to provide pinups for several other magazines Harrison published for many years. Some of his earlier works he did while working with Harrison were signed “Steffa” or “Black Smith”.

In 1946, Earl Moran moved to Hollywood to continue to paint starlets. Soon he met a young model that wanted him to paint her for extra money. She was Marilyn Monroe and he would paint her for the next four years and they became good friends. She once said he made her legs look better than they really were. In February of 2011, a Moran Marilyn pastel sold for $83,650 at auction. The work he created during this time has become the most sought after in his career. He continued to live and work in California until 1955, after which he moved to Las Vegas. Around this time he began to move away from the pinups and focused more on fine-art nudes.

He worked with Aaron Brothers Galleries and continued to paint until 1982, when his eyesight failed. Earl Steffa Moran died in Santa Monica, CA in 1984.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Earl Steffa Moran.

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn (1922-1993)

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn, Jr. was born in April, 1922 in Portland, Oregon. By 1940, Diebenkorn entered Stanford University, where he met his first two artistic mentors. With a concentration on studio art and art history, he studied under Victor Arnautoff and Daniel Mendelowitz. The latter encouraged his interest in such American artists as Arthur Dove, and Edward Hopper. Mendelowitz also took his promising student to visit the home of Sarah Stein, sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein, where he saw works by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. This early exposure to European modernism would guide his creative output in the future. In June, 1943, Diebenkorn married fellow Stanford student Phyllis Gilman.

Diebenkorn served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1943 until 1945. While stationed in Quantico, Virginia, he visited a number of important collections of modern art, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Gallatin Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, which was particularly influential for him. During this time he experimented with abstract watercolor as well as making the representational sketches that would continue when he was stationed in Hawaii, and these are often referred to as his “wartime” work.

Between 1946 and 1953, Richard Diebenkorn moved several times for jobs and opportunities. He created bodies of work that represent “periods” in his career and artistic development. The works created during a period reflect the inspiration found where he was living at the time. He produced abstract or abstract expressionist works as part of his Sausalito Period, Albuquerque Period, Urbana Period and Berkeley Period during these years.

In late 1955, Diebenkorn suddenly launched upon a path that veered dramatically from his early abstract period. He began to work in a “representational” mode, painting and drawing landscapes and figure studies. He was also prolific in the still life genre, but it was the figurative and landscape paintings of this period (1956–67) that created an ever increasing audience for his work. In March, 1956, he had the first of nine exhibitions at the Poindexter Gallery in New York; these were duly noted by the East Coast art establishment and helped further his national reputation.

In 1964 he was invited to visit the Soviet Union on a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. State Department. There he was able to see the great Matisse paintings at the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which had been unavailable to most of the world for decades. This experience fed his work of the next period.

In 1967, Diebenkorn returned to abstraction, this time in a personal, geometric style that stands apart from his early abstract expressionist period. The “Ocean Park” period, began in 1967 and developed for over twenty-five years, becoming his most famous work and resulted in more than 140 paintings. Based on the aerial landscape and perhaps the view from the window of his studio, these large-scale abstract compositions are named after a community in Santa Monica, California.

By 1976, Diebenkorn was established as an American master. In 1980 and 1981, Diebenkorn produced a group of works on paper known as the “Clubs and Spades” drawings. When these were shown at Knoedler Gallery, the reaction was somewhat perplexed; with time however, these images have become some of the most highly prized of his works.

In the spring of 1988, Richard Diebenkorn and his wife moved from Santa Monica to Healdsburg, California. In his Healdsburg studio he worked in mostly small scale, producing some of the most perfectly executed, works of his life. Though he experienced serious health problems during much of his time in Healdsburg, he was able to continue his restless exploration of form and color and poetic metaphor.

In late 1992, the Diebenkorns were forced to take up residence at their Berkeley apartment in order to be nearer to medical treatment. Richard Diebenkorn died there on March 3s0, 1993.

Additional Links
Jane Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, with essays by John Elderfield, Ruth E. Fine, and Jane Livingston
http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Diebenkorn-Ahmanson-Murphy-Fine-Arts/dp/0520212576
Richard Diebenkorn: Figurative Works on Paper by Jane Livingston and Barnaby Conrad III

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0811842193?tag=basquiatnet-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0811842193&adid=012V6S72F3K41N8ZBEPQ&

Artist quote
American painter Richard Diebenkorn once wrote, “I want painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems ... the better.”

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Richard Clifford Diebenkorn.

Francis Augustus Silva (1835-1886)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Francis Augustus Silva.

Everett Shinn (1876-1953)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Everett Shinn.

Jim Dine (b.1935)

American artist Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio to second-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In 1948, Dine began to take art classes at the studio of local artist Vincent Taylor, and in high school, he attended evening classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He studied at night at the Cincinnati Art Academy during his senior year of high school and then attended the University of Cincinnati, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Ohio University, Athens, from which he received his B.F.A. in 1957. Dine moved to New York in 1959.
Later that year Dine, along with Claes Oldenburg and Marc Racliff, opened the Judson Gallery in the Judson Memorial Church with a group exhibition. He also became represented by the Reuben Gallery. By 1960, Dine had become known as one of the important creators of “Happenings”, such as Smiling Workman, The Vaudeville Show, and Car Crash. These events were inspired by personal events, found materials, and a sense of collaboration shared by others, such as Allan Kaprow and Oldenburg.

In 1962 Dine’s work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historic and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is considered to be one of the first “Pop Art” exhibitions in America. The Pop-Abstract Expressionist divide had lasting effects for Dine. Like many of his colleagues, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg. Jim Dine did not separate himself completely from Abstract Expressionism. Instead, he blended an expressive and human style with recognizable and often personal objects. He was able to incorporate the basic philosophies of both movements into his work. In a 1963 interview, “What is Pop Art,” Dine explained his position:
“I don’t believe there was a sharp break and this [Pop Art] is replacing Abstract Expressionism. Pop art is only one facet of my work. More than popular images I’m interested in personal images…I tie myself to Abstract Expressionism like fathers and sons.”

Constantly traveling, he moved frequently to find inspiration in different environments and grow creatively from new challenges. He has also sought out new print shops and foundries to continue evolving his work and developing new techniques. In 1965, Jim Dine was a guest lecturer at Yale University and artist-in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio. He was a visiting artist at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1967. Also in 1967, Dine moved to London. He was represented by the Fraser Gallery there and spent the next four years developing his art. Returning to the United States in 1971, he focused on several series of drawings. In the 1980’s sculpture resumed a prominent place in his art. In 1984, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, exhibited his work as “Jim Dine: Five Themes,” and in 1989, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts hosted “Jim Dine Drawings: 1973-1987”. “For me, drawing is everything—because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It’s the way I begin everything.”

By 2004, the National Gallery of Art, Washington organized the exhibition, “Drawings of Jim Dine.” In May of 2008, Jim Dine inaugurated a nine meter high bronze statue depicting a walking Pinocchio, named Walking to Borås. Dine previously worked on a commercial book, paintings, and sculptures that focused on Pinocchio. He feels that “the idea of a talking stick becoming a boy [is] like a metaphor for art, and it’s the ultimate alchemical transformation.” His work appears in major collections across the United States and abroad, and he has been honored with several prizes and admissions to prestigious art societies, such as the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters, New York, and the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. Over the last four decades, Dine has produced more than three thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry, and even music. His art has been the subject of numerous individual and group shows and is in the permanent collections of museums around the world.

Selected Public Collections:

Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, NY; National Gallery, Washington DC; Boston Museum of Fine Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angles County Museum; Art Museum, Princeton University; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Cincinnati Art Museum, Akron Art Institute, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; Western Australian Museum, Perth; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.

Links:

LONE WOLF
An interview with Jim Dine
by Ilka Skobie

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/scobie/jim-dine6-28-10.asp
YouTube: Inside New York’s Art World: Jim Dine
Interviewer: Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QJpESM5c3c

Embed video

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Jim Dine.

Jessi Willcox Smith (1863-1935)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Jessi Willcox Smith.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874-1951)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Joseph Christian Leyendecker.

Louis Ritman (1889-1963)

Louis Ritman was born in Russia in 1889, but grew up in Chicago. To help support his family, he worked as an apprentice for a sign company. His foreman recognized his artistic ability and encouraged him to study painting.

Ritman’s first formal art lessons were in evening classes at Jane Addam’s Hull House under Enella Benedict, who studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. Other training included the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine where he studied under William Merritt Chase.

By 1909, Ritman moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. His talent was soon discovered and he was accepted to study under the master, Adolphe Dechenaud, who was a two-time winner of the Prix de Rome, a highly respected award given to academic painters in France. By 1911, Louis Ritman had a painting accepted into the Paris Salon which was a huge accomplishment for an American painter.

In Paris, at the famous Caf du Monde, Ritman joined other regulars Frederick Frieseke, Richard Miller and Lawton Parker, immersed in an area that inspired so many American artists. It was with their invitation that Ritman went to Giverny. He would return to Giverny to paint every summer for five years. Ritman’s Giverny paintings employ the French Impressionist style and palette with an American interpretation of color found in nature. Frieseke played an important role in Ritman’s life as a friend and fellow artist. It was Frieseke that introduced Ritman to the Macbeth Gallery in New York. In 1913, Louis Ritman’s work was accepted again to the Paris Salon.

During the years of World War I, Ritman returned to Chicago where he had a one-man show at the Art Institute of Chicago. The show was a huge success. In 1915, he won a silver medal in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco for Early Morning in a Garden and Breakfast.

Throughout the years of 1909 to 1929, Ritman travelled between France and America. In 1930, after twenty years of painting, Louis Ritman was invited to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago and he remained there for thirty years. He retired and moved to Winona, Minnesota where he died in 1963.

Although he executed several landscape and still-life paintings, he is best known for his figurative work and for his intimate scenes with partial nudes. Early in his career, Ritman mastered the impressionist technique and its basic principles, perfected by continuous experimentation. Ritman paintings can be found at museums across the world including Butler Institute of American Art, The Dayton Art Museum, University of Kentucky Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Frederich Weisman Art Museum.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Louis Ritman.

Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917-2009)

Andrew Newell Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was the youngest of the five children of illustrator and artist N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth and his wife, Carolyn Bockus Wyeth. As a child, Andrew was home-tutored because of his frail health. His studies of writing, poetry, music and movies heightened his artistic sensitivity. He began drawing at a young age, and was a draftsman before he could read. When he was a teenager, his father brought him into him studio for the only art lessons he ever had. His father inspired Newell’s love of rural landscapes, sense of romance and artistic traditions. During his teenage years, Andrew produced illustrations under his father’s name. Andrew Newell mastered figure study and watercolor, and learned egg tempera from his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd. He studied art history and admired masters of Renaissance and American painting, especially Winslow Homer.

Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily classified as a realist painter. He worked predominantly in a regionalist style. In 1937, Wyeth had his first one-man show at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. His works that were displayed were watercolors depicting scenes around Port Clyde, Maine. He also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1943, he participated in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that presented “American Realists and Magic Realists.” In 1947 and 1966, he exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where 200 of his paintings were on display. In 1960, the Royal Academy in London, England, held its first Andrew Wyeth retrospective exhibition, entitled “The Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth.” The exhibition came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1976.

In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James, who played an important role in managing his career. In 1945, his father and three-year-old nephew died in a tragic car accident. Andrew Newell Wyeth referred to his father’s death as a formative emotional event in his artistic career, in addition to being a personal tragedy. This event, along with his personal lung illness in 1950 led him to portraying survivors and their surroundings in great depth and detail.

Andrew Newell Wyeth was a recipient of many awards from institutions and societies including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Carnegie Institute, the Wilmington Museum, the Butler Art Institute, the American Academy & Institute of Arts, the American Watercolor Society, as well as many others. President John F. Kennedy nominated Andrew Newell Wyeth for the Medal of Freedom, and President Lyndon B. Johnson presented it to him in 1963. In 1990, President George Bush awarded Wyeth the Congressional Medal.

Wyeth’s work is in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the University of Nebraska; New Britain Museum, and the Delaware Trust Bank.

Andrew Newell Wyeth died on January 16, 2009. He died in his sleep at his Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania home, after a brief illness. He was 91 years old.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Andrew Newell Wyeth.

Robert Spencer (1879-1931)

Robert Spencer was born in Harvard, Nebraska in 1879. After briefly studying medicine, he moved to New York to pursue a career in art. Spencer first studied art at the National Academy of Design from 1899 to 1901 under Francis C Jones and R. Blum. He continued his studies at The New York School of Design with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. In 1906, he moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There he studied with renowned painter, Daniel Garber. He would live and work in Pennsylvania for the next twenty five years.

Robert Spencer’s career had its first big success in 1914 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of his early canvases. Another important success for his career was when Duncan Phillips, the well known collector, took an interest in his work and purchased eight canvases that are now part of the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

As a landscape painter of urban life, he studied the changing ways of life in American cities during the early twentieth century. As a New Hope impressionist, Spencer favored painting the local architecture and people in his paintings. He believed that a painting without people was a very lonely scene. In 1925 and 1927, Spencer traveled to France, Italy and Spain and as a result of the influences he found there, his later works turned to religious themes. Late in his career, Spencer’s work became looser and more spontaneous similar to modernist ideas.

During Spencer’s career, he won many awards, including the Inness Medal from the National Academy of Design in 1914, the Sesnan Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1914, the Gold Medal from the San Francisco Pan Pacific Exposition in 1915 and the Isidor Gold Medal from the National Academy of Design in 1928. Robert Spencer was elected an Associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1914 and Academician by 1920.

He suffered several nervous breakdowns before committing suicide in 1931, at the age of 59. Today, Robert Spencer’s art is part of important private and public collections including The Smithsonian Art Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Princeton Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, The Phillips Collection, The National Academy Museum, NYC and The Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Robert Spencer.

William Wendt (1865-1946)

William Wendt, an American landscape painter, was born on 1865 in Bentzen, Germany. At age 15, Wendt immigrated to the United States and worked in Chicago as commercial artist and studied for a short time at the Chicago Art Institute. Early on, he enjoyed easel painting and began to develop his own unique style for painting.

Between 1894 and 1906, Wendt and his close friend Garner Symons made several trips to Southern California. Wendt’s adoption of impressionism began 1896 when he and Symons were painting together on the Malibu Rancho near Los Angeles.

In Chicago, Wendt wasn’t a successful artist, but his art was well received in California almost instantly upon him settling there in 1906. In California, William Wendt worked outside, “en plein air”, and experimented with the unique native landscape, often exploring the wilderness. He had a reverence for nature, particularly the unsettled wilderness, which he regarded as a place for peace and contemplation. Wendt’s landscape paintings were especially known for their rich greens and browns. Wendt was a founding member of the California Art Club and served as its president for six years. This organization reflected Wendt’s commitment to plein-air painting of the California landscape. He became known as the “Dean of Southern California landscape painters.”

William Wendt received many awards, including the Bronze Medal from the Buffalo Exposition in 1901, the Kirchberger Prize from the Chicago Art Institute in 1913, the Silver Medal from San Francisco Exposition in 1915, the Black Prize from the California Art Club in 1916 and the Ranger Purchase Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1926.

As Los Angeles became more populated, William Wendt navigated away from the busy city and in 1919 settled in Laguna Beach where he died in 1946.

William Wendt’s work can be found in many collections including the Union Club in Seattle, the Art Institute of California, the Pasadena Art Institute and in the Springville, Utah Museum.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by William Wendt.

Howard Terpning (b.1927)

Howard Terpning was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1927. As a boy, he loved drawing and knew that he wanted to be an artist. At the early age of 15, Terpning became fascinated with the West and Native Americans when he spent the summer near Durango, Colorado. At 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served from 1945 through 1946. After leaving the military, he enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art to study commercial art. He continued his education at the American Academy of Art, where he studied drawing and painting.

After art school, he was introduced Haddon Sundblom, a well-respected illustrator at the time. Sundblom hired him as an apprentice for his Chicago studio. Terpning was working on his own commissions in less than 2 years. His career as a commercial artist was well on its way.

In 1958, Howard Terpning moved to New York where he was hired by a major Chicago studio. By 1962, Terpning was working as a freelance artist and using an agent to facilitate the business aspect of his paintings. As a result, he got work creating illustrations for such publications as Time, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping and Field and Stream. Terpning also completed 80 movie posters including Cleopatra, Doctor Zhivago, The Sound of Music and the 1967 re-release of Gone with the Wind. In 1967, Howard Terpning went to Vietnam as a civilian combat artist in the midst of his commercial art career. He lived for a month with the Marines documenting the war. Upon his return, Terpning created six paintings that are now at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Around 1974, Howard Terpning decided to explore his interest in the American West and Plain Indians. His paintings primary objective was to tell Indians story. “We could have learned so much from the American Indians if we had had the interest to listen to them and pay attention to them,” Terpning says. He painted and sold his work in Western galleries with his first painting selling for approximately $2500. After three years, he moved to Arizona, leaving the commercial art world behind to focus solely on painting the American West. Within two years, he was elected to the National Academy of Western Art and the Cowboy Artists of America. In his 22 years as an active member of the Cowboy Artists of America, Terpning earned 42 awards for his work. He was awarded 7 by the National Academy of Western Art and 11 by the Autry Museum of the American West and many, many more prestigious awards throughout this career.

Howard Terpning walked away from a successful illustration career to pursue his dream of chronicling Native American people and within two short years became a giant in his field. Some of the museums Terpning’s work can be found at include the Phoenix Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gilcrease Museum, Eiteljorg Museum and the Booth Western Art Museum.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Howard Terpning.

Jamie (James Browning) Wyeth (1946)

James Browning “Jamie” Wyeth, a contemporary American realist painter, was born on July 6, 1946 in Wilmington, Delaware. Wyeth is the son of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth, and grandson of N.C. Wyeth. He is the artistic heir to the Brandywine School Tradition, painters who worked in the rural Brandywine River area of Delaware and Pennsylvania, portraying its landscape, people and animals. As a child he demonstrated remarkable drawing skills. Wyeth attended public school for six years, and was then tutored by his family, concentrating on art.

When he was 12 years old, Jamie studied with his aunt, Carolyn Wyeth, a well-known artist in her own right. At the time she was a resident of the N.C. Wyeth House and Studio, which was filled with the art work and props of Jamie’s grandfather. Wyeth spent his mornings learning English and history at his home, and in the afternoon he joined other students at the studio where he studied the fundamentals of drawing and composition. Jamie developed an interest in working with oil paint, and looked to Carolyn and Howard Pyle for early inspiration. In working with watercolor Jamie looked to his father for inspiration.

By the age of 18, Wyeth’s paintings were in the permanent collections of the Wilmington Society of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, and in the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. At age 19, Jamie traveled to New York City to continue studying artistic resources. Here he learned the human anatomy by visiting a Harlem hospital morgue.

While serving in the Delaware Air National Guard from 1966 to 1971, Wyeth was commissioned to paint a portrait of Delaware’s governor, Charles L. Terry. Jamie Wyeth was persuaded by people close to the Kennedys to undertake a posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy. He studied photographs and motion picture footage of the president, as well as making numerous pictures of his brothers, Robert and Edward Kennedy. Wyeth took part in Eyewitness to Space, a program designed to record details of the United States space probes. Jamie Wyeth also sketched incidents in the Senate and Supreme Court relating to Watergate developments for Harper’s Magazine. In 1969, Jamie Wyeth depicted his father in Portrait of Andrew Wyeth. He went on to paint President-elect Jimmy Carter, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev and Arnold Schwarzenegger during the 1970s. In 1984, Wyeth painted Night Vision to commemorate the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. His primary subjects in the 1970s and 1980s were the people, animals, and landscapes of Pennsylvania and of Monhegan Island in Maine.

Jamie Wyeth’s works are in the collections of the Brandywine River Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Terra Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery and the Fine Arts Museum of San Fransisco. He was appointed a council member of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972, and in 1975 he became a member of the board of governors of the National Space Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society. Wyeth holds honorary degrees from Elizabeth town College, Dickinson School of Law, and Pine Manor College.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Jamie (James Browning) Wyeth.

John French Sloan (1871-1951)

John French Sloan was born in 1871 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He may have studied art in high school, where some fellow classmates were William Glackens and Albert C. Barnes. The three of them would go on to make major contributions to American art as adults. At sixteen, John Sloan became the sole provider for his family and dropped out of school to work in a book store. There he had access to the stores print department and art books. He began creating etchings and was able sell them in the store. Later, he worked as a designer for a greeting card company and then went on to work as an illustrator for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Press. He also created illustrations for several magazines and journals to earn money.

His first formal art training came when he studied under Thomas Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1892. In the same year, Sloan met Robert Henri, an artist that soon became a mentor to him. Henri encouraged Sloan to start painting and often sent him reproductions of European artists like Goya, Velázquez and Manet. Together, Henri and Sloan promoted a new form of realism that helped to redefine American Art.

John French Sloan began painting seriously in 1896. His training consisted of a few classes at various institutions, his study and reproduction of works by masters and his work experience as an etcher and draughtsman. By 1903, he had produced approximately sixty oil paintings. In 1904, Sloan moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where he painted some of his best known urban genre paintings. Sloan was also a member of The Eight, a group of American artists that included Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Earnest Lawson, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, William Glackens and George Luks. During this time, Sloan became a leading political figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. In 1910, Sloan joined the Socialist party and soon after that became art editor of the radical journal, The Masses.

By 1913, Sloan participated in the Armory Show and the same year, his old class mate and now renowned collector, Albert Barnes purchased one of his paintings. The Armory Show broaden his exposure to European Modernist works and consequently influenced him to slowly move away from painting urban scenes for landscape subjects with a Fauves color pallet.

In 1914, Sloan taught at the Art Students League. Sloan also taught for a brief period at the George Luks Art School. His students admired him for his practical knowledge and integrity. In 1916, John French Sloan co-founded The Society of Independent Artists. Art Critic Robert Hughes praised the influence of “the most lyrical, and politically acerbic of the Ashcan artists, ‘a spectator of life’, as he called himself.” Sloan’s work had an honest humane-ness, a frank sympathy. He refused to flatten lower-class New Yorkers into stereotypes of misery, and his strong sense of the moments in which ordinary people are seen unaware, or isolated, deeply affected a leading artist of the next generation, Edward Hopper.

In 1939, Sloan published an autobiography entitled, Gist of Art. In the book, Sloan writes: “I have always painted for myself and made my living by illustrating and teaching. I have never made a living from my painting.” In the 1940s, Sloan began painting a series of nudes. On September 7, 1951, John French Sloan died of cancer in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was a premier member of the Ashcan School, whose works are highly coveted and collected today. He influenced a new generation important artists, included Alexander Calder, Reginald Marsh and Barnett Newman. John French Sloan pieces can be seen in the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, the Delaware Art Museum and various other institutions.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by John French Sloan.

Julius LeBlanc Stewart (1855-1919)

Julius LeBlanc Stewart, an American artist who spent his career in Paris, was born on September 6, 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, William Hood Stewart, was a sugar millionaire. In 1865, he moved his family to Paris, where he became a distinguished art collector. He specialized in the works of the contemporary Spanish-Roman school, including Zamacois, Fortuny, and de Madrazo. As a teenager, Julius LeBlanc Stewart studied under Eduardo Zamacois. He later went on to study at the École des Beaux Arts under Jean-LéonGérôme, and later was a pupil of Raymondo de Madrazo.

Stewart’s family wealth enabled him to paint what he pleased, particularly large-scaled group portraits of his family and friends, including actresses, celebrities and aristocrats. Stewart often painted a self-portrait somewhere in the crowd. Julius LeBlanc Stewart exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon from 1878 into the early 20th century. His paintings The Hunt Ball (1885) and The Hunt Supper (1889) were shown at the Paris Exposition and firmly established his reputation. The Baptism (1892) depicted a gathering of the Vanderbilt family, and was shown at the 1893 Chicago World Columbian Exposition, and received acclaim at the 1895 Berlin International Exposition.

Stewart painted portraits of high society women, depicting their evolving roles in a changing society: from the depiction of beauty for beauty’s sake to the portrayal of the educated sophisticate. He also painted nudes out-of-doors, a subject which was more acceptable in France than America at the time. However, after a religious crisis and conversion in 1905, Stewart toned down his subject matter.

Julius LeBlanc Stewart died on January 5, 1919. He remained a bachelor throughout his life.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Julius LeBlanc Stewart.

N.C.(Newell Convers) Wyeth (1882-1945)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by N.C.(Newell Convers) Wyeth.

Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861-1948)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Irving Ramsey Wiles.

Reuven Rubin (1893-1974)

The first painter in Israel to gain international recognition, Reuven Zelicovici (later Rubin), developed a unique style that blended the influences of Henri Rousseau and other European post-Impressionists with his own Eastern nuances and neo-Byzantine
styles. Born in Romania in 1893, Rubin left to study at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 1912. However, he soon left in search of more current European styles, pursuing his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

In New York after World War I, Rubin met the renowned Alfred Stieglitz who helped organize an exhibition of Rubin’s artwork at Anderson Gallery. Upon his return to the East, Rubin immigrated to Palestine and set up a studio in Tel Aviv. Only two years later, he was appointed Chairman of the Association of Painters and Sculptors of Palestine and honored with a solo exhibition at the Tower of David in Jerusalem.

Rubin began his career at a very important moment in history. At the time, there was not
a specific Jewish art heritage to be built upon or rebelled against. Thus, Rubin and his
contemporaries strove to create a new Eretz-Yisrael style that was modern but distinctly
their own. Biblical stories, local landscapes and folklore are recurring themes in his
paintings that are often Cezannesque in style and palette. Many of his paintings are filled
with an almost spiritual light, including his flowered still lifes that are nearly ethereal.

Rubin has been honored many times in his life: with the Dizengoff Prize in 1964; a
biography, published in 1969 (My Life – My Art); the Israel Prize for his life’s work in art in 1973; and the Rubin Museum, established in his late home and studio in Tel Aviv, in 1983. His artworks are increasingly sought after even today. Rubin died in Israel in 1974.

Other Impressionist Artists
Roland Petersen
Raoul Dufy
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Lin Fengmiam
Joseph Henry Sharp
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey
Carl Rungius

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Reuven Rubin.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

Carl Rungius (1869-1959)

Carl Rungius was born in Germany in 1896 into a large family with seven sisters and one brother. His family had interests in art, nature, and taxidermy and he loved to hunt early on his life. As a teenager, he had a chance to see an exhibition of work by wildlife artist, Richard Friese and from then on Carl Rungius knew he wanted to be an artist. He studied at the Berlin Art Academy between 1888 and 1890 and frequently sketched animals at the Berlin Zoo. He also studied an animal’s anatomy by visiting glue factories.

An uncle invited Carl Rungius to hunt moose in Maine in 1894. The following year, he traveled to Wyoming to hunt and sketch. So captivated with the scenery and big game, Rungius decided to move to the United States in 1896. Rungius spent summers in Wyoming and winters in his New York studio for the next ten years. While in Wyoming, he would study and sketch the animals and landscape for his compositions that he would paint during the winter in New York. He also worked as an illustrator for hunting and naturalist magazines or books.

During this time, Theodore Roosevelt was promoting conservation and established many National Parks and the United States Forest Service. These efforts helped Rungius’ reputation grow as a premier wildlife artist. By 1909, he was able to give up his illustrative work and focus full time on painting. In 1910 he was offered the opportunity to visit the Canadian Rockies and hunt. The experience made a strong impression on him. In 1921, he built a studio in Banff, that he called “The Paintbox”. He would work there from April to October each year.

Carl Rungius is known for his ability to capture wildlife in their nature environment. This ability sets him apart from other artists working at the time who used wild animals as their subjects. Both animal and landscape are equally important in his work. They are romanticized and void of any human presence.

The National Museum of Wildlife Art holds the largest public collection of Rungius’ work in the United States. Upon his death in 1959, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary bought the entire Rungius estate including paintings, sketches, photographs and personal belongings of his studios in Banff and New York.

Other Impressionist Artists
Roland Petersen
Raoul Dufy
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Lin Fengmiam
Joseph Henry Sharp
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Carl Rungius.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

John Singer Sargent, an American portrait painter, was born on January 12, 1856 in Florence, Italy. He was born to American parents that lived in Europe most of their lives. Sargent traveled continuously with his parents during his childhood. He showed art talent at an early age that was encouraged by his mother, who was an amateur painter.

Sargent studied while in Rome at the age of 12 with Carl Welsch, a German-American artist. In 1870, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In 1874, he was accepted at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, however he decided to transfer to the less academically oriented atelier of Carolus Duran. Duran was a portrait painter who blended realism with a certain freedom of style, and served as a great inspiration for the work of Sargent. John Singer Sargent was also inspired by the portrait style of Velasquex, the Tonalism of James Whistler, and the Impressionism of Edgar Degas. Sargent spent much time at the home of Monet in Giverny, where he absorbed Impressionist techniques.

During the early 1880s, Sargent painted street scenes and interiors in Venice. In 1882, he created portraits including The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. His commissions included Madame Pierre Gautreau, a renowned beauty and member of Parisian society who was known for her bold approach towards fashion. He captured her beauty in his painting Madame X, which caused an uproar in France over the “risqué” depiction of Gautreau with a diamond strap falling off of her shoulder. This controversy compromised his career in France, and as a result, Sargent settled in London in 1886, where he had a highly successful career as a portrait painter for prominent British families such as the Wertheimers and the Marlboroughs. During this time he traveled frequently to the United States, where he continued to acquire many portrait commissions, especially from upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers.

In 1888, John Singer Sargent had a solo exhibition of his paintings at the Botolph Club. During the early 1890s, Sargent began a 25 year mural project for the Boston Public Library. He also painted murals for the Widener Library at Harvard University during this time. In 1906, Sargent abandoned formal portraiture in order to concentrate on plein air landscapes and mural work. He spent the remainder of his career making extended painting trips to France, Italy, and Switzerland. Many of the works he produced on these trips were executed in watercolor.

John Singer Sargent died in London on April 14, 1925. His paintings are in major public collections throughout England and the United States. The collections include Brooklyn Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Royal Portrait Gallery in London.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by John Singer Sargent.

Guy Rose (1867-1925)

Guy Orlando Rose was born in San Gabriel, California in 1867 to a prominent family. His first introduction to art was at the age of nine, when he began to sketch and paint as a means of entertaining himself while recovering from a hunting accident. After graduating from high school, he moved to San Francisco and attended the School of Design. In 1888, he moved to Paris to continue his studies and enrolled at the Academie Julian.

In 1898, Guy Rose became the first California artist to receive honorable mention at the Paris Salon. A year later, he won a scholarship at the Academie Delacluse. His early work, done in Paris, reflected the then fashionable Oriental motifs. By the mid 1890s, he moved to New York and continued to paint, but also engaged in work as an illustrator for such prestigious publications as “Harper’s,” “Scribners,” and “Century”. He also taught at the Pratt Institute in New York.

In 1899, Guy Rose returned to France and bought a cottage at Giverny, but spent most of his time living in Paris from 1900 to 1904. He also spent his winters painting in Algeria. From 1904 to 1912, Rose lived and worked in Giverny and had the benefit of being exposed to other Impressionist artists painting there, including Monet. Monet became a close friend to Guy Rose and a mentor. Around this time, Rose was having problems with lead poisoning from paint, which made it difficult to work for long periods of time. This problem would affect him for the rest of his life.

In 1913, he moved back to the United States with a style well formulated in the Impressionist movement. He taught plein air sketching in Rhode Island for a year. Lead poisoning continued to plague him and affected his vision and crippled his hands. In 1914, he settled in California where he taught art and worked as Director of the Stickney School of Art in Pasadena. He also became a member of the California Art Club and Painters and Sculptors of Los Angeles. In 1921 Guy Rose had a stroke that left him paralyzed. He died in 1925.

Guy Rose was one of California’s leading impressionist painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Awards
1894 Honorable Mention, Paris Salon
1901 Bronze Medal, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo
1915 Silver Medal, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco
1915 Gold Medal, Panama-California Exposition, San Diego
1921 William Preston Harrison Prize, California Art Club

Museum Collections

Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California
Cleveland Museum, Cleveland, Ohio
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
The Oakland Museum, California
Pasadena Art Institute, Pasadena, California

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Guy Rose.

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)

Norman Percevel Rockwell, a 20th-century American painter and illustrator, was born on February 3, 1894 in New York City. Rockwell is most widely known for his cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post for more than four decades. Among his best-known works are the Wille Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, Saying Grace, and the Four Freedoms series. Rockwell also created works for the Boy Scouts of America, producing covers for their publication Boys’ Life, calendars, and other illustrations.

Norman Rockwell drew inspiration as a child from his father and grandfather. He transferred from high school to the Chase Art School at the age of 14. He went on to study at the National Academy of Design, and at the newly formed Arts Students League, where he was taught by George Bridgman and Thomas Fogarty. Also serving as powerful influences on Rockwell’s development were N.C. Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker, Maxfield Parrish, and Howard Pyle. In 1912 at the age of 18, Rockwell had his first major breakthrough with his first book illustration for Carl Harry Claudy’s Tell Me Why: Stories about Mother Nature.

At the age of 21, Rockwell’s family moved to New Rochelle, New York, where he shared a studio with cartoonist Clyde Forsythe. Forsythe worked for The Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell sold his first cover piece to The Saturday Evening Post at age 22. This began a 322 cover relationship between Rockwell and the Post over 47 years. Rockwell’s success in the Post led to covers for other magazines, including The Literary Digest, The Country Gentleman, Leslie’s Weekly, Judge, People’s Popular Monthly and Life Magazine. His sense of humor was incorporated into his works, drawing the viewer into the composition to share the magic between the viewer and artist. Rockwell painted the scenes and people close to him, as well as strangers who he asked to sit for him. His art of storytelling integrated with his skills as an artist.

In the 1940s, Norman Rockwell moved to Arlington, Vermont, where he started to create full-canvas paintings. In 1943, during World War II, Rockwell joined the legion of artists and writers involved in the war effort to help boost the sale of savings bonds. As a result of his efforts, he painted the Four Freedoms series, inspired by a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt in which he described four principles for universal rights: Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, and Freedom from Fear.

Rockwell later produced The Peace Corps in Ethiopia, which captured the idealism of the Kennedy years in a realistic setting. He also painted portraits of Presidents Kennedy, Eisenhower, Nixon and Johnson, as well as portraits of other world leaders including Nehru of India and Nassar of Egypt.

In 1977, Norman Rockwell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America’s highest civilian honor, for his “vivid and affectionate portraits of our country”.

Norman Rockwell died on November 8, 1978 of emphysema in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts is home to the world’s largest collection of Rockwell’s art.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Norman Rockwell.

Theodore Robinson (1852-1896)

Theodore Robinson, an American painter best known for his Impressionist landscapes, was born on July 3, 1852 in Irasburg, Vermont. When Robinson was a young child his family moved to Evansville, Wisconsin, where he spent the majority of his boyhood. In the late 1880s, he was one of the first American artists to take up Impressionism; several of his works are considered American Impressionism masterpieces.

Robinson studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York City in 1874. Here he studied at the National Academy of Design. In 1876, Robinson went to Paris where he studied for two years under Carolus-Duran and Jean-Leon Gerome, and alongside John Singer Sargent. During this time his paintings were mostly of landscapes and figures executed in a realistic style.

Theodore Robinson taught in both New York City and Boston upon his return to the U.S., and did decorative work for public and private buildings under John La Farge. During this time he made several trips, on which he summered with artists Joe Evans and Abbott Thayer and produced paintings of local subjects.

In 1884, Robinson returned to France; he worked in Paris and Barbizon and was strongly influenced by the Barbizon school. In 1887 while living in Giverny, Theodore Robinson met resident artist, Claude Monet. He took tremendous inspiration from Monet; his colors became softer, his brushstrokes lighter, and his paintings more sensitive. Like Monet, he utilized the same outdoor scene in different lights.

Robinson returned to the U.S. in 1892, applying his fully developed Impressionist style to American subjects. He painted New England scenery, landscapes along the Erie and Delaware Canals, and taught outdoor summer classes for Evelyn College in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the Brooklyn Art School. Theodore Robinson died of an acute asthmatic attack on April 2, 1896 in New York City.

Theodore Robinson’s paintings are in the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Terra Museum of American Art, the Georgia Museum of Art and in many other public and private collections.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Theodore Robinson.

Guy Carleton Wiggins (1883 - 1962)

A second generation artist, this native New Yorker from Brooklyn found inspiration in New England’s rich landscapes and distinct seasons. Born in 1883, his father Carleton Wiggins instilled in him the love of painting. He dallied in architecture, but later changed course and returned to painting by enrolling in the National Academy of Design. There he studied under the renowned William Merritt Chase and, later, Robert Henri. Wiggins quickly found success: by the time he was twenty, he became the youngest American artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection. He was awarded many prizes throughout his life, including the prestigious Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as honors from the Connecticut Academy of Arts and the Salmagundi Club.

By the end of the 19th century, as Impressionism spread across America, Wiggins joined the artist colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. There he learned to fuse the French traditions with American techniques and subject matter, particularly in his landscapes. However, it was the time spent in his New York studio painting fleeting city scenes for which he is most remembered. Painted from a window, Wiggins captured the bustling city life in the midst of a blustery winter storm. The pulsing city seems to be quietly hushed by the blankets of snow that cover the canvases. Recognizable landmarks and buildings hark back to his affinity for architecture, while the deft handling of light and color emphasizes his love of the Impressionist style and the fleeting nature of the moment.

One of the great American Impressionists, Wiggins enjoyed a long, successful career, both as a painter and as a teacher. He died in 1962 while on vacation in St. Augustine, Florida.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Guy Carleton Wiggins.

Available for Purchase
(click artwork for details)

William Trost Richards (1833-1905)

William Trost Richards, an American landscape and marine artist, was born on June 3, 1833 in Philadelphia. He is associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Richards’ formal education ended at the age of thirteen when he quit school to support his family by working as a commercial draughtsman designing ornamental metal fixtures. During this time he studied privately with William Stanley Haseltine and German artist Paul Weber, from whom he learned a meticulous graphic technique. William was supported by local persons in Philadelphia who financed a year of study in Europe from 1855 to 1856. Richards’ first public showing was part of an exhibition in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1958. The exhibition was organized by artist Albert Bierstadt. In 1862, Richards was elected honorary member of the National Academy of Design, and Academician in 1871. He became a member of the Association of the Advanced of Truth in Art, and American Pre-Raphaelite group in 1863. During the 1970s, Richards produced many acclaimed watercolor vies of the White Mountains. Several of these paintings are currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1861 to 1899, William Trost Richards exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and from 1863 to 1885, he exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association. In 1871, he was elected a full member of the National Academy.

William Trost Richards painted meticulous factual renderings, rather than the romanticized and stylized approach of other Hudson River painters. He was inspired by American poetry and American landscape painters John Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church. The latter part of his career was focused on coastal and marine paintings.

Richards’ works are featured today in many American museums, including the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

William Trost Richards died on April 17, 1905 in Newport, Rhode Island.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by William Trost Richards.

Granville Redmond (1871-1935)

Granville Redmond was born in 1871 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Around the age of two, he had Scarlet Fever, which is believed to have left him deaf. His family moved to California, so that he could have the best education with his disability.

From 1879 to 1890, he attended the Berkley School for the Deaf in California. There his artistic talents were noticed and he first studied drawing and painting. When Granville Redmond graduated, he went on to study at the California School of Design in San Francisco and won the W. E. Brown Medal of Excellence. In 1893, he won a scholarship that enabled him to study in Paris at the Académie Julian under teachers Jean-Paul Lauren and Benjamin Constant. In 1895, one of his paintings was accepted for the Paris Salon. By 1898, he returned to California and settled in Los Angeles.

While living in Los Angeles, Redmond became friends with Charles Chaplin, who was struck by the expressiveness the deaf used while communicating. Chaplin asked Redmond to help develop techniques for his silent films and gave him a studio on the movie lot. Chaplin was impressed with Redmond’s skills and collected his paintings. Granville Redmond also appeared in Chaplin films, such as The Gold Rush, The Kid, A Dog’s Life, and City Lights. Even while working as an actor, Redmond never stopped painting.

Redmond was a member of the Bohemian Club, California Art Club, Laguna Beach Art Association and San Francisco Art Association. He was awarded a medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 and the silver medal at the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition, Seattle in 1909.

Redmond had become a leading California landscape painter known for his impressionist landscapes of Northern and Southern California. He was inspired by the California landscape and painted primarily coastal scenes between Laguna Beach and Monterey, California. Granville Redmond’s paintings also utilized pointillism and tonalism during his painting career.

Granville Redmond died in Los Angeles, California in 1935. A large percentage of Redmond’s original paintings are found in museums located in California, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Irvine Museum in Irvine and the Oakland Museum of California.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Granville Redmond.

Edward Willis Redfield (1869-1965)

Edward Willis Redfield, an American Impressionist landscape painter, was born in 1869 in Bridgeville, Delaware. He moved to Philadelphia as a child and lived much of his life near New Hope in Bucks County. There he became the leader of a group of artists known as the New Hope Impressionists. He painted many landscapes, paying special attention to panoramic snowscenes of the area. He used techniques opposing those of French Impressionism: thick paint application on large canvases with long brush strokes.

Redfield showed artistic talent at an early age. From 1887 to 1889, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There he met and befriended Robert Henri. Edward Willis Redfield later studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in France under Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. While in Europe, he was inspired by the works of Impressionist painters Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Fritz Thaulow. Redfield met Elise Deligant during his time in France, whom he married in 1893. He and his wife returned to Pennsylvania in 1898 and settled in Center Bridge in Bucks County near New Hope. His presence in the area lured many younger artists to Bucks County, making it a nucleus for the American Impressionist movement.

The Impressionist landscape paintings of Edward Willis Redfield are noted for their bold application of paint and vibrant color. He painted en plein air, working from nature rather than in a studio. He exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad. He also won an array of awards, including a Bronze medal, Paris Exposition (1900); Bronze Medal, Pan-American Exposition (1901); Temple Medal (1903), Jennie Sesnan Gold Medal (1904), Gold Medal of Honor (1907), Lippincott Prize (1912), and Stotesbury prize (1920), all from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Silver medal (1904), St. Louis Exposition; Fischer Prize and Gold Medal (1908) form the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Honorable Mention (1908) and Third Class Medal (1909), Paris Salon; Palmer Gold Medal (1913), Chicago Art Institute; Hors Concous Prize (1915), Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco; Carnegie Prize (1918), Altman Prize (1919), and Saltus Medal (1927), National Academy of Design.

Redfield’s paintings are included in museums and public collections, such as the Boston Museum of Art, Brooklyn Art Institute, Carnegie Institute, Chicago Art Institute, Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Twenty-seven of his paintings were featured at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Today his paintings are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

A harsh critic of his own art, in 1947 he burned hundreds of his paintings that he regarded as inferior. Edward Willis Redfield died on October 9, 1965 at the age of 96.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Edward Willis Redfield.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1925)

Maurice Brazil Prendergast, a U.S. Post-Impressionist artist, was born on October 10, 1858 in St. John’s, a city in Newfoundland, Canada. At the age of 10, Prendergast moved to Boston with his family. In the mid-1870s, he was an apprentice to a painter of show cards. From his experience in his apprenticeship he began working with watercolor, which remained his principal medium until 1900 when he turned to oil painting. He later worked as a letterer, sign painter, poster designer, and worked at beach resorts in the Boston area during the late 1880s.

In 1891, Marice Brazil Prendergast went to Paris, where he attended the Academie Julian in Paris with Jean Paul Laurens. He also studied at the Academie Colaross in Rome with Blane, and later at the Canadian J.W. Morrice in Paris. He became familiar with Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and Nabis painting through his friendship with James Wilson Morrice. In 1894, he returned to the United States and settled in Winchester, Massachusetts. He began exhibiting there, in New York, at the Chicago Art Institute, and at the Cincinnati Art Museum. In 1907 Prendergast traveled back to Paris, taking inspiration from Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, leading Fauve artists.

An acquaintance with Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard placed him in the Post-Impressionist group. He created paintings with bold contrasting, jewel-like colors, and flattened, pattern-like forms. His paintings have been described as resembling mosaics.

In 1913, Prendergast was an organizer of the Armory Show, where he displayed seven works. He was a member of the New York Water Color Club, Copley Society, Boston Water Color Club, Guild of Boston Artists, American Painters, the Society of Independent Artists and the New Society of Artists. Prendergast was technically a member of The Eight; however his compositions had little in common with the philosophy of the group.

Prendergast died in New York City on February 1, 1924.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Maurice Brazil Prendergast.

Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927)

Edward Henry Potthast was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1857. At twelve years old, he studied at Cincinnati’s new McMicken School of Design. He showed a natural artistic talent. At sixteen, he had an apprenticeship with a lithographic firm in Cincinnati. In 1879, he began to study with Thomas Satterwhite Noble, a portrait and figure painter, who employed a dark palette and a rich, painterly technique. He later studied at the Royal Academy in Munich. Edward Potthast then studied for briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris.

In 1885, Edward Potthast returned to Cincinnati and resumed his training with Thomas Noble. His paintings of the time were heavily influenced by the Munich School with dark tones. Potthast’s subjects included interiors and landscapes. The following year, he returned to Paris, to continue his studies and was first influenced by the Impressionist artists working at the Grez colony. When he returned to America, his work was very much impressionistic in style. In 1894, he was the only American to be included in the exhibition entitled “Light Pictures” at the Cincinnati Art Museum. In 1895, he moved to New York, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. Having supported himself as a lithographer up until now, at age thirty-nine, he was finally able to focus on his fine art career after the Cincinnati Museum of Art purchased a painting.

His watercolors and oil paintings were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1896 and at the National Academy of Design in 1897. Edward Henry Potthast won the academy’s Thomas B. Clarke prize for best figure painting in 1899, the same year was he was elected an associate of the academy.

By 1908 he occupied a studio in the Gainsborough Building overlooking Central Park. The park and the beaches of New York and New England were where he found inspiration for his work. He would become most known for his happy scenes of people playing on the beach or friends picnicking in the park. His scenes were always depicting a sunny day and people at leisure. Potthast was made a full academician of National Academy of Design in 1906.

He exhibited frequently at the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists and the Salmagundi Club and won many awards. In 1927, Edward Henry Potthast died of a heart attack in his studio at the age of 70. His work is included in many major museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Art Institute of Chicago; Cincinnati Art Museum; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Edward Henry Potthast.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

Camille Pissarro, a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter, was born on the island of St. Thomas on July 10, 1830. His father, Frederick Pissarro was of Portuguese Jewish decent, and his mother Rachel Pissarro was native Creole. His father was a merchant who married the widow of his deceased uncle. The marriage caused trouble within the small Jewish community of St. Thomas, either because Rachel was not Jewish, or because she was previously married to Frederick’s uncle. Thus, their four children were forced to attend the all-black primary school. At the age of 12, he was sent to France to attend Savary Academy in Passy near Paris. Here he developed an early appreciation of the French art masters. Monsieur Savary himself game him a strong grounding in drawing and painting. However, in 1847 he returned to St. Thomas, where he engaged against his will in the family business.

In 1852, Pissarro went to Venezuela with Danish artist Fritz Melbye, and brought back various sketches. In 1855 he traveled back to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse. He worked as assistant to Danish painter Anton Melbye, and studied the paintings of Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Millet, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Camille Pissarro’s initial paintings were in the traditional standards of the Paris Salon committee in order for his work to be shown. The Paris Salon’s annual exhibition was essentially the only marketplace for young artists to gain exposure.

While in Paris, Pissarro met Camille Corot and fell under his influence. They shared a love of rural scenes painted from nature. From him, Pissarro was inspired to paint outdoors, or “plein air” painting. His first painting was exhibited in 1859. Pissarro began to understand and appreciate the importance of expressing the beauties of nature without adulteration.

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Pissarro moved his family to Norwood, a village outside of London. Being of Danish nationality he was unable to join the army. In London his paintings of what was later called “Impressionist” style did not do well. During this time Pissarro created paintings of Sydenham and the Norwoods. One of the largest of these paintings, The Avenue, Sydenham, is in the collection of the London National Gallery. Twelve oil paintings date from his stay in Upper Norwood. Pissarro met Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in London, who helped to sell his paintings for most of his life.

When Pissarro returned to France after the war, he discovered that of the 1,500 paintings he had created over 20 years, only 40 remained. The others had been damaged or destroyed by the soldiers. It is assumed that many of the destroyed paintings were of the Impressionist style which he was then developing.

During the 1880s, Pissarro began to explore new themes and methods of painting. He created paintings of the life of country people, as he had done in Venezuela in his youth. This period marked the end of the Impressionist period. It was Camille Pissarro’s intention to help educate the public by painting people at work or home in realistic settings, without idealizing their lives.

In 1884, Pissarro met George Seurat and Paul Signac. Both had a more “scientific” theory of painting, using very small patches of pure colors to create the illusion of blended colors and shading when viewed from a distance. Pissarro spent 1885 to 1888 practicing pointillism.

Camille Pissarro died on November 13, 1903 from blood poisoning. He was survived by sons Lucien, Georges, Félix, Ludovic-Rodolphe, Paul Emile; and daughter, Jeanne.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Camille Pissarro.

Maxfield Frederick Parrish (1870-1966)

Maxfield Parrish was as born as Fredrick Parrish in 1870 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He later changed his name to Maxfield, the maiden name of his paternal grandmother. His father, a painter and etcher, encouraged Parrish’s artistic interest at an early age by introducing him to many diverse styles, techniques, subject matters along with trips to Europe. Influenced by the Gothic and Renaissance architecture he saw in Europe, he enrolled at Haverford College to become an architect in 1888.

In 1892, he decided to take a new path and enrolled at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he first experimented with his unique glazing technique, which would later defined Parrish’s style as an artist. His technique of glazing incorporated bright layers of oil color separated by varnish that was applied alternately over a base rendering. Parrish usually used a “Parrish blue” and white as the under painting. This technique gave his work an incredible and unique three dimensional quality. Parrish was influenced by Howard Pyle, an illustrator at The Drexel Institute of Arts in Philadelphia. In 1895, this influence helped Maxfield Parrish obtain a magazine commission for the Harper’s Bazaar cover.

Parrish illustrated L. Frank Baum’s Mother Goose in Prose in 1987. Other prestigious projects by Parrish include Eugene Field’s Poems of Childhood and Arabian Nights. In the 1910s and 1920s, Parrish continued to receive commissions by numerous publications, including Colliers, Life and Hearst’s. He also got work from several advertisers including Edison-Mazda Lamps, Fisk Tires, Colgate, Wanamaker’s and Oneida Cutlery.

In the 1920s, Parrish put aside illustration and focused on painting. For many years he painted nudes, using his nanny or often himself as a model. In the 1930s, his subjects changed to landscapes. Always innovative with technique, Maxfield Parrish would build models of the landscapes he wished to paint and with different lighting setups he would decide the best view for the painting. Once he was happy with the view, he would photograph the model as a basis for the painting.

His unique combination of color and fantasy scenes appealed to the mass audiences. Because his work was so accessible via popular magazines and the books that he illustrated, he was very much a public artist. In 2001, Maxfield Parrish was featured in a U.S. Post Office commemorative stamp series that honored twenty American Illustrators including Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington and Rockwell Kent.

In 1962, at the age of 91, he stopped creating art as a result of poor health. Maxfield Parrish died at his home in New Hampshire called “The Oaks” in 1966 at the age of 95. The National Museum of American Illustration holds the largest collection of Parrish works totaling sixty-nine pieces and other samples can be found at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The San Diego Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art and the Cornish Colony Art Museum.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Maxfield Frederick Parrish.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Pierre Auguste Renoir.

Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Edgar Alwin Payne.

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)

Raoul Dufy was born in Le Havre, France in 1877. He first began to study art by taking evening classes at Le Havre’s École d’Art at the age of 18. His earliest works consisted of Norman landscapes in watercolors.

In 1900, Dufy moved to Paris with a scholarship to the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. Artist Georges Braque was a classmate and they would remain lifelong friends. During this time, he became strongly influenced by impressionist painters of the time, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. In 1902, he was given the opportunity to exhibit his work in Berthe Weill’s gallery and in 1903 at the Salon des Independants. He continued to paint around France, including Le Havre.

In 1905, Dufy’s style would change dramatically as he would be introduced to Henri Matisse and other Fauves at the Salon des Indépendants. The emphasis on bright color and bold contouring lines was exciting for him. Dufy experimented with Fauvism and later with Cubism until around 1920. At this point, Dufy began working in his own unique style by incorporating skeletal structures, foreshortened perspective, and light sweeps of color. He used quick brush strokes in a technique known as stenographic.

Dufy’s subjects are typically landscape scenes of Paris or the Riveria, interiors or parties with music playing an important role. By 1925, he was an established painter and received commissions to paint murals for many French public buildings. For the 1937 World’s Fair, Raoul Dufy was commissioned to create a large fresco celebrating electricity for the Paris electricity distribution company. He also was a successful illustrator and commercial artist, designing tapestries, fabrics and ceramics.

He began to suffer from multiple-arthritis in 1937, and moved to southwestern France for his health. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Raoul Dufy exhibited at the annual Salon des Tuileries in Paris. He died in 1953, and he was buried near Matisse just outside of Nice.

Other Impressionist Artists
Roland Petersen
Walter Launt Palmer
Sven Birger Sandzen
Lin Fengmiam
Joseph Henry Sharp
Marc (Moishe Shagal) Chagall
Louis Valtat
Reuven Rubin
Jean Pierre Cassigneul
Gerald Harvey
Carl Rungius

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Raoul Dufy.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

William Robinson Leigh (1866-1955)

William R. Leigh was born in West Virginia in 1866. At age fourteen, he enrolled in classes at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, and studied for three years. He then moved to Munich, where he studied at the Royal Academy for over a decade. While there, he received the annual medal six times in succession. He left Germany in 1895.

Upon returning to the United States, William Robinson Leigh lived in New York City and created illustrations for magazines, including McClure’s Magazine, The Century, Scribner’s and Collier’s. He was successful as an illustrator, but longed for new challenges. He found it in 1906 when the Sante Fe Railroad offered him passage west in exchange for a painting of the Grand Canyon. He traveled through New Mexico and Arizona. This trip greatly influenced William R. Leigh and his later works would focus on images of the Western landscape, its inspiring wilderness, and inhabitants. The Santa Fe Railroad commissioned five more paintings.

Leigh painted the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Forest, but his primary interest was the Hopi and Navajo Indians, who he painted every summer from 1912 to 1926. His work reflects the changing light, and the color display when the sun sets over the mountains. William Robinson Leigh was often referred to as “The Sagebrush Rembrandt”. He noted in The Western Pony, a book that he wrote and illustrated in 1933: “I find in the West the truly typical and distinctively American motifs, a grandeur in natural surroundings, a dramatic simplicity in life which can be found nowhere else. In that life, in those surroundings-marvelously varied and abundant-the horse plays a major role.”
William Robinson Leigh never lived in the west, but instead split his time painting the western landscape or people, and in New York, teaching with his wife. He and his wife, Ethel Traphagen, opened the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York. The school was known for their innovations and claim responsibility for introducing shorts and slacks to women’s wear lines.

In 1926, he was commissioned to paint backgrounds for the Akeley African hall in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He made a second trip to Africa in 1928. From 1932 to 1935, he painted all the backgrounds for each exhibit shown in the African Hall. By 1940, Leigh was well established as a fine artist. In addition to his commissions, Leigh exhibited at the Paris Salon, National Academy of Design, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Some of the paintings inspired by his travels in the Southwest are owned by important collectors in both United States and abroad, including the Duke of Windsor and the late King Albert of the Belgians.

Leigh died in New York on March 11, 1955. The Leigh studio is installed at the Thomas Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma where over 500 paintings and 300 drawings are held.

Other Museum Collections
Arizona State University Art Museum
Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh / Carnegie Institute
Desert Caballeros Western Museum
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art
Farnsworth Art Museum
Gilcrease Museum
Heckscher Museum
Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art
Joslyn Art Museum
National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum
National Gallery of Art
National Museum of Wildlife Art
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
Rockwell Museum of Western Art
Sangre de Cristo Arts Center
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Springville Museum of Art
Stark Museum of Art
The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art
The Newark Museum
The Sid Richardson Colletion of Western Art
The University of Arizona Museum of Art
The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts
Thyssen-Bonemisza Collection
Witte Museum
Woolaroc Museum

Similar Artists
William Acheff
Bill Anton
Gerald Harvey
Joseph Henry Sharp
Martin Grelle
G. Russell Case

Link
Antique Roadshow appraisal video of William Robinson Leigh painting. Interesting facts. This painting appraised for $75,000.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200605A30.html

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by William Robinson Leigh.

Sold
(click artwork for details)

Ferns Isabel Kuns Coppedge (1883-1951)

Fern Isabel Coppedge was born in July of 1888. She was raised on her family’s farm near Decatur, Illinois with five sisters and a brother. At thirteen, she moved to California with an older sister and had her first experiences with art. There she visited art galleries for the first time and became interested in painting when her sister began studying watercolor. From this early age, she was inspired by the glistening sunlight reflected on snow and sea, and by the marvelous creative possibilities.

After returning to the Midwest, Coppedge studied at McPherson College and then went on to the University of Kansas. From 1908-1910, she continued her studies by attending the Art Institute of Chicago. She also studied with Vincent DuMond and William Merritt Chase in New York at the Arts Student League. In 1917 after having moved to Pennsylvania, Coppedge was accepted to the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At PAFA, Coppedge studied with Daniel Garber and Henry Snell and became a member of the Philadelphia Ten. She was a member of this influential group from 1922-1935.

As a landscape artist, Fern Coppedge painted the villages and farms of Bucks County, PA often blanketed with snow, as well as harbor scenes from Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she spent her summers. Coppedge’s early work, influenced by American impressionism, was marked by shimmering colors and attention to the effects of changing light upon a landscape. Coppedge was known to brave the elements in her bearskin coat and paint with frozen fingers, creating some of her most admired Bucks County winter scenes. She worked directly from nature and would tie her canvas to a tree, during winter storms. She often sketched and painted from the back seat of her car. She was regarded as “something of a local character”, as noted in a description of a 1933 exhibition review by Elizabeth Arnold. She spent much of her life in Pennsylvania where she was associated with the New Hope School of American Impressionism, the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and what became known as the Pennsylvania Impressionism movement.

During her artistic career she received numerous awards including the Shillard Medal in Philadelphia, a Gold Medal from the Exposition of Women’s Achievements, another Gold Medal from the Plastics Club of Philadelphia, and the Kansas City H.O. Dean Prize for Landscape. She was a member of several prominent art organizations including the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Art Students League of New York, and the Philadelphia Ten.

Fern Coppedge died at her home in New Hope on April 12, 1951. Her paintings hang in many private collections and museums, including the James A. Michener Art Museum.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Ferns Isabel Kuns Coppedge.

Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910)

Seymour Guy was born and raised in Greenwich, England in 1824. Both his parents died while he was still a child and he was placed in the care of a guardian. He developed an early interest in art and was fond of painting dogs and horses. At the age of thirteen, he first expressed a desire to become an artist, at the displeasure of his guardian. Not dissuaded, Guy took up sign painting and earned enough money to buy the supplies to continue his art training. It is also believed that in the 1830s he studied with marine painter Thomas Buttersworth, who was a resident of Greenwich and had a successful career as a painter of ships and coastal scenes.

Around 1839, Seymour Guy began a seven year apprenticeship in the oil and color trade. This experience taught him how to mix pigments and prepare binders. The experience led Guy to grind and mix pigments for his own work. By 1845, he received the money from his parent’s estate. This was also close to the time his guardian passed away and his apprenticeship was over. Seymour Guy finally had the freedom and means to pursue his training to become an artist. He turned down an opportunity to study at the Royal Academy in London and instead decided to study on his own at the British Museum. A friend helped him obtain the necessary permit to set up his easel and copy paintings in the galleries. Guy decided to supplement his experience at the museum by joining the studio of the painter Ambrosini Jerôme. For appoximetly four years, he spent several days a week with Jerôme. Under Jerôme’s tutelage, Seymour Guy focused on whatever brought in money; portraiture, designs for naval basins and other projects.

In 1854, Guy and his family immigrated to New York and settling in Brooklyn. He had a studio in the Dodworth Building on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, which housed the studios of a number of the city’s leading artists. He also became close friends with the English-born genre painter, John George Brown. During their years together in Brooklyn, Guy and Brown gravitated toward artists and collectors of British heritage. They formed close friendships with the Scottish-born collector and amateur artist John M. Falconer and the English-born collector and restaurateur John Campion Force. Seymour Guy began to paint genre scenes of children about 1861. During this year, he also became one of the founding members of the Brooklyn Art Association and was named an associate of the National Academy the following year. As is typical of his genre paintings, the surface of the picture is marked by a smooth, glossy, enamel-like surface. Colors are carefully blended and fused, and brushstrokes are invisible.

By 1863, Guy and Brown moved their studios into the Tenth Street Studio Building in Manhattan. Many prominent artists resided there during the course of Guy’s forty-seven year occupancy including Sanford Robinson Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, and William Merritt Chase.

In 1873 Seymour Guy received the most important and controversial commission of his career, a portrait of William Henry Vanderbilt and his family posed in the drawing room of their home in New York as they prepare to go out to the opera. Vanderbilt had become fond of Guy during the course of his frequent visits to the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he acquired genre paintings by Guy, Brown, and other artist tenants. Going to the Opera was displayed at the 1874 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, where it attracted great crowds because of its representation of members of such a prominent family, but received a generally poor reception from the art critics. Following the exhibition of Going to the Opera, Guy devoted most of his attention for the next decade to creating generally small domestic genre scenes. He never again created a work on the scale and ambition of the Vanderbilt picture. During the 1880s, he returned to creating portraits on a regular basis and also developed an interest in painting ideal heads, sometimes portraying a woman in a picturesque setting or out being entertained. His paintings were esteemed by his fellow artists and by important collectors of American art. With the emergence of a younger generation of European-trained artists in the 1880s, Seymour Guy’s smoothly polished scenes of childhood began to fall out of fashion.

By the time of his death in 1910, Seymour Guy was almost completely forgotten as an artist. During the last decade of his life he seems to have served as something of an elder statesman to younger artists interested in increasing their knowledge about the art and craft of painting. Today he is known as one of the most beloved genre painters of the nineteenth century. His works may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Seymour Joseph Guy.

Bob F Kuhn (1920-2007)

Bob F. Kuhn, an American Realist-Impressionist painter of animals, was born in Buffalo, New York in 1920. Kuhn was intrigued by animals from the time of his childhood, observing and drawing animals at the Buffalo Zoo. In 1937, he studied design, anatomy, and life-drawing at the Pratt Institute in New York City.

From 1940 to 1970, Kuhn worked steadily as an illustrator for such outdoor magazines as Field and Stream, True and Outdoor Life. He also illustrated books and advertisements, and in 1964 he began painting for the Remington Arms Company Game Art Calendar. During this period, Bob F. Kuhn served as a merchant seaman in World War II for a year and a half.

Kuhn turned exclusively to easel painting of wildlife in 1970. He painted simple backgrounds with horizontal bands of color and light, capturing particular movements and personalities of wild animals. His works are in the permanent collections of many museums, including the National Museum of Wildlife Art. His work has won prestigious awards, including the 1991 Prix de West awarded by the Academy of Western Art for his painting Lair of the Cat. Kuhn was influenced by Paul Bransom, and has studied animals on location all over North American and Africa.

Bob F. Kuhn died in Tucson, Arizona on October 1, 2007.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Bob F Kuhn.

Ernest Lawson (1873-1939)

Ernest Lawson, a Canadian-American painter and a member of The Eight, was born on March 22, 1873 in Hailfax, Nova Scotia. In 1888 he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where his father practiced medicine. He enrolled in the Kansas City Art League School, however, without sufficient funds for art studies he accompanied his father to Mexico City, where he worked as a draughtsman for an engineering company.

In 1890, Lawson enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied under J. Alden Weir, and John H. Twachtman, who was an important figure in his formative years. In1893, Ernest Lawson studied at the Académie Julian with Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. Upon his return to the United States, Lawson began formulating his own individualistic aesthetic. He took inspiration from Robert Henri and the other independent artists with who he began to associate with.

In 1898, Ernest Lawson moved to Washington Heights in Manhattan, where he painted landscapes, paying special attention to the Hudson River. During this time Lawson was active somewhat in Canada, where he exhibited at the Canadian Art Club in Toronto, of which he was a member. His first painting was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada.
In 1908, Ernest Lawson participated in the exhibition of “The Eight” at Macbeth Gallery. Unlike his fellow members of The Eight who were in rebellion against the beauty of Impressionist landscape painting, Lawson represented it. In 1912, he cofounded the National Association of Painters and Sculptors, who in 1913 planned the Armory Show that remains famous in art history for being a large-scale introduction of modernist art to the American public. Lawson was elected a Full Member of the National Academy of Design 1917. In 1926, Lawson returned to Kansas City to teach at the Art Institute. He also taught at the Broadmoor Academy from 1927 to 1928, and briefly in Hartford, Connecticut.

Ernest Lawson’s later life was troubled with personal, financial and health problems. He died on December 18, 1939 near Miami, Florida. His cause of death was drowning, which some thought to be suicide.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Ernest Lawson.

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Georgia Totto O’Keeffe.

Berthe Morisot (1841 - 1895)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Berthe Morisot.

Winlow Homer (1836-1910)

Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 24, 1836 to Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Benson Homer. Homer’s mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist, from whom he inherited many traits, including her artistic talent. His father was a relentless businessman who left his family in search of making money; however his projects never materialized. Homer spent most of his childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and from a young age his artistic talent was evident.

At the age of 19, Winslow Homer became an apprentice in the Boston lithographic firm of J.H. Bufford. After three years at his apprenticeship, Homer became a freelance illustrator. He contributed to Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, and Harper’s Weekly, where he later became a leading illustrator. Winslow Homer’s early works consisted of mostly commercial engravings of urban and country social scenes. Clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark and lively figure groups were qualities that remained important throughout his career. Homer had a strong understanding of graphic design, and his work was adaptable to wood engraving.

In 1859, Homer opened a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. He went on to study at the National Academy of Design in 1863, and studied briefly with Frédéric Rondel, who taught him the basics of painting. Harper’s sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War, where he sketched battle scenes, camp life, commanders, and the army of Major General George B. McClellan at the banks of the Potomac River. He also illustrated women, and showed the effects of the war on the home front. During this time, Winslow Homer’s skills expanded from illustrator to painter.

When Homer returned to his studio, he set out to create a series of war-related paintings that were based on his sketches. Among the set were Sharpshooter on Picket Duty (1862), Home, Sweet Home (1863), and Prisoners from the Front (1866). Winslow Homer was elected as an Associate Academician after the exhibition of Home Sweet Home at the National Academy. He was then elected as a full Academician in 1865. After the war, his attention was primarily focused on the scenes of childhood and young women. Crossing the Pasture (1871-1872) depicts idealize brotherhood with the hope of a united future after the war that pitted brother against brother.

Winslow Homer traveled to Paris, France in 1867. His most praised early painting, Prisoners from the Front, exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. While he continued to work for Harper’s, Homer practiced landscape painting, depicting scenes of peasant Parisian life. Homer exhibited his watercolor paintings at the American Society of Painters in Watercolors in 1874, and three years later became a member of the organization. In addition to adopting watercolor as his primary form of expression, he also found inspiration in Japanese art. Homer incorporated asymmetrical pictorial arrangement and flat areas of color into his work, and embraced the Aesthetic Movement’s emphasis on beauty. He portrayed fashionably dressed women rather than genteel. This shift in style was accompanied by a new interest in decoration and tiling. Paintings of rural African American life resulted from visits to Petersburg, Virginia around 1876. Paintings included Dressing for the Carnival (1877) and A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876). In 1877, Homer’s oil painting, An Afternoon Sun, exhibited at the Boston Art Club, where he continued to exhibit often until 1909.
In 1881, Homer traveled to England, where he lived in Cullercoats for almost two years. He undertook the subject of the human struggle with nature; the focus that occupied him for the rest of his career. During this time he painted mostly in watercolor, producing works of local inhabitants, particularly the fisherwomen. He displayed these women in a heroic manner that conveyed a sense of courage and strength. The size of his compositions during this period enlarged.

After his time in England, Winslow Homer retreated to Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he built a studio overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Homer’s subject matter shifted to references of the physical and spiritual power of nature. In the mid-1880s, Homer made his first etchings, seven of the eight that were created from 1884 to 1889 were based on his sea paintings and his English watercolors. In 1890, Homer created the first painting in a series of the seascapes at Prout’s Neck. These works became the most admired of his late oil paintings.

Homer died in 1910 at the age of 74 in his Prout’s Neck studio. His painting Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, remains unfinished. Winslow Homer is widely regarded as one of the most important painters in the United States. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors during his lifetime, and his work continues to be admired.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Winlow Homer.

Henri Baptiste Lebasque (1865-1937)

Henri Baptiste Lebasque was born in France at Champigné in 1865. Lebasque began his education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Angers. In 1886, he moved to Paris where he studied under Léon Bonnat, focusing on portrait painting. During this time he also assisted Ferdinand Humbert with the decorative murals at the Panthéon. Other young painters had influence on Lebasque’s work, especially Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, Intimists and founders of The Nabis’ Group. Lebasque learned the significance of a colour theory and the use of complementary colours in shading from his acquaintance with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

In 1903, Henri Baptiste Lebasque was a founding member with Henri Matisse of the Salon d’Automne, whose exhibiting artists became known as Les Fauves (Wild Beasts) for their brash use of color and savage presentation of shapes. Lebasque adopted their flatness of shape and color; however, he was more fluid in presentation.
Henri Baptiste Lebasque worked on the decorations at the theatre of Champs-Elysées and of the Transatlantique sealiner. His paintings are represented in French museums, including Angers, Geneva (Petit Palais), Lille (Musée des Beaux-Arts), Nantes, and Paris (Musée d’Orsay).
Lebasque died in 1937 at Cannet, Aples Maritimes. Twenty years after his death, Musée des Ponchettes in Nice presented the first retrospective of his works.

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Henri Baptiste Lebasque.

Clarence Raymond Johnson (1894-1981)

Ackerman's Fine Art is actively purchasing works by Clarence Raymond Johnson.