John La Farge Art

Eleanor Park Custis painted scenes as varied as the artist's travels: from her hometown of Washington, D.C., to the coastal towns of New England; from the prosperous fishing villages of Brittany, to Venice and the mountain villages and lakes of northern Italy. While Custis's subjects are diverse, her style is consistent and distinctive throughout this body of work. Her use of flat areas of color delineated by dark contours is reminiscent of the aesthetics of woodblock printing. Like many artists of the day, she was profoundly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, and her adaptation of the aesthetic by 1924 led to her most productive artistic period. Eleanor Custis hailed from a socially prominent Washington, D.C., family. She was distantly related to Martha Custis Washington, America's first First Lady. Custis began three years of formal art training in the autumn of 1915 at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, and was guided and inspired by Impressionist artist Edmund C. Tarbell, one of the Ten American Painters, who became the Corcoran School's principal in 1918. Custis exhibited widely in many of the Washington art societies and clubs for much of her career. She was also a frequent exhibitor at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City; her last one-woman show there was in April 1945. Custis's mature style emerged in scenes of the streets, wharves, and drydocks of seacoast villages from Maine to Massachusetts, which she visited during the summers of 1924 and 1925. She was working in Gloucester, Massachusetts in August 1924, and painted several gouaches of the town's wharves and winding streets, including In Gloucester Harbor and At the Drydock, Gloucester. During her stay, Custis may have met Jane Peterson or at least must have seen her work, the best of which was executed in Gloucester during the preceding ten years. The similarity between their styles is unmistakable, but, while it may be tempting to suggest that Custis was influenced by Peterson during her summer in Gloucester, the connection between their work is probably more a case of shared aesthetics and common European influences. Custis expanded her subject repertoire with three trips to Europe between 1926 and 1929, and was inspired by the Old World charm of Holland, northern France, Switzerland, and Italy, leading to such works as New Kirk, Delft, Holland, Market Day in Quimper, At the Foot of the Matterhorn, and The Town Square, Varenna. A Mediterranean cruise in 1934 introduced her to the Near East, and the bustling, colorful streets and bazaars of Cairo, captured in works like A Street in Cairo, Egypt and A Moroccan Jug...

NYC Subway Riders Mid 20th Century American Scene Social Realism WPA Modern 1930s Daniel Celentano (1902 - 1980) Subway Scene, 1930s 8 x 9 inches Ink and wash on paper Singed lower ...

Last Metro to Bleeker Street. Watercolor painting hand signed by Peter Emanuel Goldman. Legendary French American Film Auteur, These are recently produced watercolor paintings base...

Man Working Mid 20th Century American Scene Social Realism Industrial WPA Modern Jo Cain (1904 - 2003) Telephone Pole Worker 38 1/4 x 18 1/2 inches Oil on pap...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943 Watercolor on paper Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

"Going to the Festival" WPA Ashcan 20th Century American Scene Modern Realism Daniel Celentano (1902 - 1980) "Going to the Festival," 14 1/2 x 10 1/2. Watercolor on paper, c. 1930s....

"Backyards" Early 20th Century Watercolor Fauvism Social Realism American Scene Note: We have three similar in style works from 1911 available now on 1stDibs. All are framed identic...

Bridge Painter WPA American Modernism Mid 20th-Century Realism Industrial Worker. Sight size: 18 x 23 1/4 inches. Estate stamped verso. This drawing is the study for a large oil we ...

Mid Century figurative landscape of a cowboy on his horse at sundown titled "Head Em Home" by Stanley M. Long (American, 1892-1972). Signed “Stanley M. Long” in bottom right corner. Displayed in a simple wood frame and off-white mat with glass. Image size: 22.75”H x 30.25”L. Frame is 1.5" deep. Stanley M. Long was a watercolorist who was born in Oakland, CA on May 4, 1892. He spent his childhood on a ranch in Napa where he broke wild horses. He began sketching when quite young and at age 15 enrolled at the San Francisco Institute of Art. He continued at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he was awarded a scholarship for further study at Académie Julian in Paris. Long served in the camouflage corps in both world wars. Long taught art in San Francisco at Mission High School and for 17 years at Polytechnic High School. His western illustrations were featured in Sunset Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Having worked with horses all his life, they were to become the main theme of his paintings. Member: Society of Western Artists, Napa Valley Art...

Answering the Door Early 20th Century w/c Fauvism Social Realism American Scene Note: We have three similar in style works from 1911 available now on 1stDibs. All are framed identi...

Seascape of waves crashing against a large rock by Joseph Yeager (early-mid 20th Century) on heavy bond watercolor paper with ragged edges. Signed "Joe Yeager" in the lower right cor...

WPA Post Office Mural Study Native American Scene Regionalism Social Realism Louise Emerson Ronnebeck (1901 - 1980) Proposal Sketch for Worland Wyoming Post Office WPA Mural Project Image: 7 x 15 inches Board 14 x 22 inches Watercolor on paper, attached to black/gray cardboard/thick paper c. 1937 Signed lower right Written in Louise's hand on mounting paper in white chalk/pencil: "Sketch for Mural...