Levi Wells Prentice

"Gooseberries, " Levi Wells Prentice, Hudson River School Forest Still Life

circa 1899

Suzanne Lalique The Tailor Shop, 1929 Signed and dated upper left Oil on canvas 13 x 16 inches Suzanne Lalique was born in 1892, the daughter of René Lalique and Alice Ledru. She wa...

William S. Schwartz Still Life with Yellow Mums, circa 1950 Signed lower right Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches Provenance: Private Collection, Massachusetts William Schwartz was born in Smorgon, Russia, in 1896, one of nine children in a poor family. He studied art at an early age, earning a scholarship at the Vilna Art School in Russia, 1908–12. He immigrated to the United States at age 17 in 1913, living in New York with his sister for eight months and then moving to Omaha, Nebraska, to live with his brother in 1915. Working as a house painter, he turned his attention to art, studying briefly with J. Laurie Wallace at the Kellom School in Omaha before moving to Chicago. He entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1916, studying with Ivan Trutnev and Karl A. Buehr, and graduating with honors in life drawing, portraiture, and painting in 1917. He supported himself as a tenor singer in vaudeville, concerts, and opera and received favorable reviews, but he chose to pursue painting instead of singing. His circle of artist friends included important Chicago modernists Aaron Bohrod, Malvin and Ivan Albright, Archibald Motley Jr., and Anthony Angarola...

Frederick Arthur Jessup Still Life Arrangement Signed lower left Oil on canvas 18 1/2 x 22 inches Provenance: Findlay Galleries, New York Private Collection, New York

Albert Swinden (1901 - 1961) Still Life of Fruit, 1937 Oil on canvas 18 x 30 inches Provenance: Graham Gallery, New York Albert Swinden (1901–1961) was an English-born American abstract painter. He was one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists, and he created significant murals as part of the Federal Art Project. Albert Swinden was born in Birmingham, England in 1901. When he was seven, he moved with his family to Canada, and in 1919 he immigrated to the United States. He lived in Chicago, where he studied for about a year and a half at the Art Institute. He then relocated to New York City, where his art education continued briefly at the National Academy of Design. He soon changed schools again, to the Art Students League, which he attended from 1930 to 1934. He studied with Hans Hofmann and gained an appreciation for Synthetic Cubism and Neoplasticism. According to painter and printmaker George McNeil, Swinden "could have influenced Hofmann ... He was working with very, very simple planes, not in this sort of Cubistic manner. Swinden was working synthetically at this time." While still a student, Swinden began teaching at the Art Students League, in 1932. Swinden married Rebecca Palter (1912–1998), from New York. Their daughter, Alice Swinden Carter, also became an artist. Carter, who attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, received an award from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston for her large sculptures. Swinden was hired for the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and he is best known for the murals which he painted as part of that project. In 1935, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia attended the opening of the inaugural exhibit at the Federal Art Project Gallery, accompanied by Audrey McMahon, New York regional director for the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project. Among the works on display was Abstraction, a sketch by Swinden; it was the design for a mural planned for the College of the City of New York. A newspaper account described it as consisting of "brightly colored T-squares, triangles and rulers in horizontal, vertical and diagonal positions". La Guardia asked what it was, and upon being told it was a mural design, he said he didn't know what it depicted. Someone joked that it could be a map of Manhattan. The displeased mayor stated that "if that's art, I belong to Tammany Hall." (Tammany Hall, which the Republican mayor referenced, was the New York Democratic Party political society.) Fearing that the mayor's negative attitude could jeopardize the future of abstract art within the Federal Art Project, McMahon dispatched an assistant to summon an artist who could speak to the mayor in defense of abstraction. The assistant returned with Arshile Gorky. Swinden played an important role in the founding of the American Abstract Artists. In 1935, he met with three friends, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, her future husband Byron Browne, and Ibram Lassaw, with the goal of exhibiting together. The group grew and started meeting in Swinden's studio, which adjoined those of Balcomb and Gertrude Greene...

Marsden Hartley Lemons and Pear, circa 1922-23 Oil on canvas 9 x 10 3/4 inches Provenance: Adelaide Shaffer Kuntz, Bronxville (Hartley’s friend and patron) Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York (acquired from the above) Private Collection, Stamford, Connecticut (acquired from the above) Barridoff Galleries, Portland, Maine, April 7, 1984, Lot 29 (as Still Life with Pear and Lemons) Richard Ward Foster (acquired at above sale) Sotheby's New York, American Art, October 6, 2017, Lot 32 Private Collection (acquired from the above) Exhibited: (possibly) Kantstrasse, Berlin, Private showing in artist’s studio, 1923. (possibly) New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Still Life Painting by European and American Painters, 1944. Born in Lewiston, Maine, Marsden Hartley became one of the most famous early modernist artists of twentieth-century American art, known for landscapes, still lifes, and some portraits. His painting showed a focus on monumental shapes, especially clouds and landscape forms, and his unique style has been described by critic Sadakichi Hartmann as "an extreme and up-to-date impressionism" and "emerging modernism that evolved through Impressionism". (Gerdts 291) He had a lonely, insecure childhood because his mother died when he was eight years old, and he was raised by an older sister when his father left to remarry. He studied art in Cleveland, Ohio and then in 1898 went to the Chase School in New York and at the National Academy of Design. He continued to spend much time in Maine painting landscapes, and by 1909 had his first exhibition, which was held at New York Gallery 291, run by Alfred Stieglitz. There he became involved with a social circle of modernists that included Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin. In 1912, he first went to Europe where he had further exposure to modernism, and from 1913 to 1915 he was in Germany. In Paris, he experimented with Cezanne-like still lifes and was befriended by Gertrude Stein. In Germany, he was influenced by Expressionism, and especially by military pageantry. It is said that his greatest contribution to early 20th-century American modernism has been his brilliant synthetic military icons known as German Officer Portraits. He developed a close homosexual relationship with a handsome young Prussian officer who was killed in World War I. Being encouraged by Stieglitz to explore American subjects, Hartley turned to American Indian objects...

Daphne Mumford Tulips Signed lower right, titled on each stretcher Oil on canvas, diptych 24 x 74 inches Daphne Mumford studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting in 1952; the Chel...

During her lifetime, Davis was best known for her exquisitely-painted floral still lifes, which she exhibited to much acclaim in New York from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s. As an a...

Signed lower left. Edward Chalmers Leavitt, artist, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, March 9, 1842, the son of Rev. Jonathan and Charlotte Esther (Stearns) Leavitt. His patern...

Signed lower left and dated 1894. Edward C. Leavitt, born in 1842, has been described as "Providence, Rhode Island's leading still-life painter" in the late 19th Century. (Zellman...

George Harvey was born in 1800 in Tottenham, England but moved to the United states at 20 years old and spent several years in the west before he established himself in New York City...

Signed lower right & dated 1888.

Strange Tracey are proud to be the exclusive agent for Fran Mora in the United Kingdom. Born in Huelva in the south of Spain in 1979, Mora studied at the School of Fine Arts in Sev...