John Dolph Art

Harrison Bird Brown (1831 - 1915) Birch Tree in Maine, New England, 19th Century Oil on canvas 25 x 13 1/8 inches Initialed lower left Provenance: Portland International Galleries, Maine Mr. and Mrs. Walter M. Jeffords, Jr., Saratoga Springs, New York and Lexington, Kentucky (President of Brooklyn Borough Gas Company) Private Collection, Chicago Exhibited: Portland Maine, Portland Museum of Art, 58 Maine Paintings 1820-1920: Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Walter M. Jeffords, Jr., May 20 - June 20, 1976, cat. no. 11. The above catalogue listing this vertical landscape will be included with your purchase. "Mr. Brown has succeeded fully in accomplishing that which Mr. John Ruskin, in speaking of J. M. W. Turner's sea views, said no painter had yet accomplished; that is, the representation of the creamy foam which the storm lashes up from the waves along a rocky shore." Harrison Bird Brown was born in 1831 in Portland, Maine, and is best known for his White Mountain landscapes and marine paintings of Maine...

19th century American school; unsigned and painted circa 1860. Displayed in a substantial and period, carved wood and gilt-gesso frame Frame dime...

John Williamson Dover Plains, New York Oil on canvas 24 x 32 inches Provenance: Estate of Catherine McEntee Linda Rodgers Private Collection, Westlake, California Brian Applegate, Ventura...

Signed and dated lower left: J. F. Cropsey / 1885

Painted by Hudson River School artist Johann Hermann Carmiencke, "Hudson River Landscape" 1865 is oil on canvas, measures 12 x 18 inches, and is signed and dated 1865 at the lower ri...

Charming Hudson River school antique oil painting of a sailboat on a lake, circa 1880-90. Signed "R. Labarr." after Richard LaBarre Goodwin...

THE WATERFALL - Oil on canvas cm. 55x70 by Paolo De Robertis, Italy 2002. The painting is inspired by the paintings of Thomas Hill, an American landscape painter belonging to the H...

Transcend is an abstracted landscape, oil on canvas, 28x38. In Sharon Gordon's landscapes, you can feel her deep connection and passion for the ever-changing nature of large bodie...

Important framed 19th century Hudson River School landscape. Possibly estate stamped. Housed in an impressive period frame. Oil on canvas.

Edward Hill (1843 - 1923) Haying at a North Conway Farm with Mount Washington in the Distance, New Hampshire Oil on canvas 13 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Private Collection, Dallas, Texas Born in Wolverhampton, England in 1843, Edward Hill was the ninth of ten children. Though ultimately less well known than his older brother Thomas Hill (1829-1908), Edward was a productive painter in oil and watercolor for more than sixty years, producing images of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, southern genre scenes, still-life paintings, portraits, American Indian pictures...

Alfred S. Wall (American, 1825-1896) Untitled (Building the Railroad), 1859 Oil on canvas 14 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches Signed and dated lower left For Christmas, 2008, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette featured Alfred Wall's painting, Old Saw Mill from the collection of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA. It was painted in 1851 in the town of Lilly, Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains. The newspaper description stated that "though the saw mill is long gone, it still conveys all the warmth and coziness of this time of year. The article, written by Patricia Lowry, continued: At first glance, Alfred S. Wall's painting of a saw mill in snowy woods triggers nostalgia for the coziness of a log cabin, the smell of a wood-burning fire and the warming of chilled hands and feet beside it. But as sentimental as it seems on the surface, Mr. Wall's painting has a deeper and unexpected context. This is more than a painting about sled-riding children and early industry planted in the middle of virgin forest. Intended or not, this is a painting about conquering the great divide of the Allegheny Mountains. For the third consecutive year, the Post-Gazette features a winter-scene painting on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. This year's painting, Old Saw Mill, was selected by co-publisher and editor-in-chief John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman during a visit to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Mr. Wall, listed as a portrait painter in the 1850 census, was about 26 when he painted Old Saw Mill in 1851. The self-taught artist was born in Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County, to William and Lucy Wall, who'd emigrated from England around 1820. An artistic sensibility ran in the family: William was a sculptor who carved ornate tombstones here; Alfred's children, A. Bryan and Bessie, were landscape painters, as was Alfred's older brother, William Coventry Wall. For more than a century the Walls formed a prominent art dynasty in Pittsburgh, and Alfred, eventually a partner in the city's most prestigious art gallery, was well known as a painter, dealer and restorer. In Old Saw Mill, two wood cutters, each holding an axe, meet outside the mill; one points in the direction of the forest. On the other side of the stream, one child pulls another down the hillside on a sled. Just behind the hill's slope, the roof of a building appears, perhaps the home of the sawyer. The luminous, late afternoon light comes from the northwest, casting lengthening shadows on the snow under a darkening sky. The saw mill in "Old Saw Mill" likely would have been impossible to track down had Mr. Wall, presumably, not written on the back of the painting: "old saw mill near Jct. 4, Portage RR, Pa." "There was no Junction 4," said Mike Garcia, park ranger at the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh near Gallitzen, Cambria County. "But there was an Inclined Plane No. 4 at Lilly, and there was a saw mill there." In fact, there were at least six saw mills at Lilly over the years, said longtime resident Jim Salony, president of the Lilly-Washington Historical Society. But when he saw an image of the painting, Mr. Salony had no trouble coming up with a location. While there are no known photographs of the saw mill, he believes it stood near the intersection of Portage and Washington streets, next to Bear Rock Run. Mr. Salony, retired academic dean at Mount Aloysius College, didn't know exactly when the mill was torn down, but it's been gone since at least the late 1800s. He was pleased to learn of the painting, even though that knowledge came too late for inclusion in a new book about Lilly, The Spirit of a Community, for which he served as primary author and editor. It runs to more than 700 pages. For a little town -- population 869 last year -- Lilly has a lot of history. Nestled in a bowl on the western slope of the Allegheny Mountains about 3 miles south of Cresson, Lilly was first settled in 1806 by Joseph Meyer and his family, who named their 332-acre land patent Dundee. Although the Meyers had left by 1811, other settlers followed, but the community didn't flourish until the 1830s, when the Allegheny Portage Railroad began its 23-year-run through the town. For 200 years the Alleghenies had stood as an impediment to trade and travel between Pittsburgh and the east. A canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh would change that and compete with New York's Erie Canal. But a portage railroad would have to be built, on which teams of horses would lead the canal boats over the mountains. Engineer Sylvester Welch began his surveying from the small settlement at Lilly. The railroad would require 10 inclined planes, some quite steep, between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. To build it, trees had to be cut along a 120-foot-wide right-of-way for 36 miles, along which track and engine houses had to be built. William Brown, who owned the saw mill on Bear Rock Run, built at least one of the engine houses at Inclined Plane No. 4; an 1834 contract also included fencing the dwelling lots at the head and foot of the plane. Lilly is located at what was the foot of Inclined Plane No. 4., giving the community one of its early informal names, Foot of Four. Named in 1883 for Richard Lilly, who'd completed the grist mill there, Lilly had another early name: Hemlock, so dubbed by a Portage Railroad traveler who smelled the bark stripped from the trees at the saw mill. Because there isn't another Allegheny Portage Railroad location like it, where a cut in the mountains opens into a bowl, Mr. Salony thinks it was Lilly that Charles Dickens wrote about following his trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Canal in late March 1842, describing what he saw after emerging from "the bottom of the cut": "It was very pretty while traveling, to look down into a valley full of light and softness, catching glimpses through the tree-tops of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, who we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homeward; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind." To get to Lilly, Mr. Wall may have taken the Pennsylvania Canal from his home in Allegheny City, now the North Side. He'd married young, at 21, to Sarah Carr in 1846, the same year he began his career as an artist. By 1880 they were living in a brick townhouse at 104 (later 814) Arch St., now demolished. Across the river in Pittsburgh he shared a studio at 67 Fourth Ave. with his brother William; they later moved to Burke's Building, today the city's oldest office building at 209-211 Fourth. But often they worked outdoors, sometimes as part of the colony of artists that grew up around painter George Hetzel beginning in the late 1860s at Scalp Level...

Signed lower left in arrowhead: RA Blakelock.