Thomas Willoughby Nason Art

After WHISTLER, James Abbott McNeil. Photogravure 10x12 2/4" paper size, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2" image size Signed in pencil with artist’s butterfly monogram. This photogravure is from the...

This framed engraving entitled "Birds-eye View of the Southern End of New York and Brooklyn, Showing the Projected Suspension-Bridge Over the East River, From the Western Terminus in Printing-House Square, New York" by Theodore R. Davis (1840–1894) was published as a supplement of Harper's Weekly, November 19, 1870. The print is presented in a maple frame and a double mat. The frame measures 23.5" high, 29" wide and 0.75" deep. There is a vertical center fold and additional vertical lines, where wood engraving blocks were joined for the printing process. It is in excellent condition. This framed image depicting New York in 1870 was a centerfold for the November 19, 1870 issue of Harper's Weekly. It includes the site and eventual appearance of the East River New York-Brooklyn Bridge; the name later shortened to the Brooklyn Bridge. The print was issued eleven months after the start of construction of the bridge on January 2, 1870, which would take another 12.5 years to complete. When this view was drawn, work on the bridge was all below ground, constructing the supports for the bridge’s towers. Labels in the upper portion of the print identify locations in the background including "Light Ship...

Lively Japanese woodblock print featuring street life. Ink on paper, circa 1860. Original artwork on paper displayed on a white mat with a gold ...

This Winslow Homer woodcut engraving entitled "Skating on the Ladies' Skating-Pond in Central Park, New York", was published in Harper's Weekly in the January 28, 1860 edition. It depicts a large number of men, women and children skating on a recently opened pond in Central Park. At the time of publication of this engraving, Central Park was in the early stages of construction. This engraving documents the very early appearance of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux's masterpiece of landscape design. According to Olmsted, the park was "of great importance as the first real Park made in this century – a democratic development of the highest significance". The people of New York were very proud of the plans for their park. It was stated at the time: "Our Park, which is progressing very satisfactorily under the management of the Commissioners, will undoubtedly be, one of these days, one of the finest place of the kind in the world...Those who saw the Park before the engineers went to work on it are amazed at the beautiful sites which have been contrived with such unpromising materials; all fair persons believe that the enterprise is managed with honesty and good taste." Skating was rapidly rising in national popularity in part due to the opening of Central Park’s lake to skaters on a Sunday in December 1858 with 300 participants. The following Sunday it attracted ten thousand skaters. By Christmas Day, a reported 50,000 people came to the park, most of them to skate. There were rules governing who could use the skating pond. “The Ladies’ Pond...

Woodlands (New Hope, Pennsylvania) Lithograph, 1950 Signed by the artist in pencil lower right (see photo) Annotated: Ed/55 in pencil by the artist lower left (see photo) Edition: 55...

This Winslow Homer woodcut engraving entitled "Making Hay", was published in Harper's Weekly in the July 6, 1872 edition. It depicts a two men hand cutting high grass on a hill. The man in the foreground is looking at a young boy and a girl (presumably his children), who are sitting on the ground with a picnic basket. This beautiful Homer woodcut engraving is presented in a brown wood frame and a light beige fabric mat with a black inner mat. The print is in excellent condition. There are two other Homer woodcut engravings in identical frames and mats that are listed on 1stdibs. See LU117326148332 and LU117326148272. These would make a wonderful display grouping. A discount is available for the purchase of two or all three of these prints. This Winslow Homer engraving...

LOT:20221109N01 Reworked woodcut, Fuji Xerox copy Each signed, dated and numbered Each edition 9 of 50 Each 41.5 x 29.5 cm Publisher: Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo Provenance: Phillips Auction...

The print 'Jones Island' is something of a self portrait. In the image, an artist stands before and easel, depicting the docks and buildings on the coast. The title indicates that this is Jones Island in Milwaukee, the peninsula along Lake Michigan that today is home to largely industrial buildings. The buildings and figures in the print suggest that this might be a view of the last of the Kashubian or German immigrant settlements on the peninsula before they were evicted in the 1940s to make way for the development of the harbor. The artist in the image thus acts as a documentarian of these peoples. The careful line-work of the woodblock engraving adds a sense of expressionism to the scene, leaving the figures and buildings looking distraught and dirty, though the image nonetheless falls into the Social Realist category that dominated American artists during the Great Depression. This print was published in 1936 as part of the Wisconsin Artists' Calendar for the year 1937, which included 52 original, hand-made prints – one for each week of the year. 6 x 5 inches, image 10 x 7.13 inches, sheet 13.43 x 12.43 inches, frame Signed "GS" in the print block,upper left Entitled "Jones Island" lower left (covered by matting) Inscribed "Wood Engraving" lower center (covered by matting) Artist name "Gerrit V. Sinclair" lower right (covered by matting) Framed to conservation standards using 100 percent rag matting and museum glass, all housed in a silver gilded moulding. Gerrit Sinclair studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1910 - 1915, under Vanderpoel, Norton, and Walcott. In World War I, he served in the Army Ambulance Corps and later recorded his experiences in a series of oil paintings. He taught in Minneapolis before arriving in Milwaukee in 1920 to become a member of the original faculty of the Layton School of Art. He was also a member of the Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors. Sinclair's paintings and drawings were executed in a lyrical, representational style, usually expressing a mood rather than a narrative. His paintings reveal a great sensitivity for color and atmosphere. His subject matter focused on cityscapes, industrial valleys, and working-class neighborhoods, captured from eye-level. A decade before the popularity of Regionalism, Sinclair's strong interest in the community was reflected not only in his paintings, but also in his encouragement to students to return to their communities as artists and teachers. Joseph Friebert...

"Paricutin (Volcano in Michoacan, Mexico)" is a woodcut and monotype signed by Carol Summers. In the image, an abstracted volcano erupts in a joyous burst of purples and oranges. The playfulness of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form. Art: 8 x 11 in Frame: 17 x 19 in Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented. In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother. From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade. After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957. Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape. In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge. Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal. By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MoMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia. Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape. In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country. In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and non-western as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image. The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist. At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...

This Winslow Homer woodcut engraving entitled "The Morning Walk, Young Ladies' School Promenading the Avenue", was published in Harper's Weekly in the...

The present woodcut engraving is an original print designed by Winslow Homer, originally published in Harper's Weekly on April 30, 1859. It is an excellent example of the many prints Homer produced of fashionable people engaged in leisurely activities, in this case along a picturesque countryside lane. The sign reading 'Belmont' on the left indicates this is probably near his home in Belmont Massachusetts. The image presents multiple figures, both men and women, riding horseback: Some in the distance gallop away, toward a town marked by a church steeple beyond. Three others in the foreground, including two equestrian women, gather around a group of children who have been gathering flowers and trapping birds...

Woodcut on BFK Rives paper, produced in 2020. Edition of 100. Mint condition, unframed. Signed and numbered in pencil by Nicolas Party.