John Costigan

Mother and Children watercolor painting by John E. Costigan

1953

Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...

Signed and dated "Allen Tucker 1930" lower left. Artwork measures 14" x 11 ¾" and framed 19" x 16 ½" x 2 ¼". Provenance: Gift from the artist to his friend Una Brage, USA/Switzerland, in the 1930s Estate of Ms. Brage to her friend Jean Corbett Peck, daughter of architect Harvey Wiley Corbett By descent About this artist: Allen Tucker, was an architect and painter so influenced by Vincent Van Gogh that he was called "Vincent in America". (Gerdts 291) Robert Henri and Maurice Prendergast were also credited as having an influence on Tucker's brushwork and compositions, the latter decisively. However, as his painting evolved, he did not fit into any tidy slot for description and was known as an individualist not easily categorized in American art history. Tucker was born in Brooklyn in 1866 and graduated from the School of Mines of Columbia University with a degree in architecture and took a job as an architectural draftsman in the architectural firm of McIvaine and Tucker, his fathers business. During that time, he studied painting at the Art Students League with Impressionist John H. Twachtman, but it was not until around 1904, when he was 38, that Tucker became a full-time painter, leaving architecture behind. Many of his early canvases were classically Impressionistic with poplar trees resembling those of Van Gogh and haystacks and corn shocks...

Original watercolor by Edward Lamson Henry looking back at barge travel through small New York state towns. Delaware & Hudson Canal, Ellenville N...

This artwork is framed with non-reflective, UV protection Museum glass. The frame size is 15.5" x 12.75" About this artist: Hugó Scheiber was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1873. His ...

Serene figurative landscape of a Zen sculpture garden surrounded by mountains and trees by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 1928-2009). From the estate of Les Anderson in Mon...

A charming and colorful vintage coastal figurative landscape watercolor by Bay Area artist Sewall Smith (American, 1904-1988), c.1960s-1970s. This coastal scene depicts a plein air art class on the beach, with a group of figures busy working at their easels. Signed "Sewall Smith" lower right. Displayed in a new mat and vintage wood frame. Image size: 10.5"H x 13.25"W Edmund Sewall Smith, known as Sewall Smith or E. Sewall Smith, was a Berkeley, California based architect and artist known for watercolor paintings with nautical themes. A well known architect, Smith moved from Niagara Falls, New York to California in 1944. He flourished as an artist in the Bay Area in the 1970’s, exhibiting extensively in the East Bay throughout this time. Exhibitions included venues such as UC Berkeley, El Cerrito...

Vintage coastal landscape of Peniche, Portugal with boats and small figures by Buford Brooks Crossland (American, 1918-2013). Signed "Buford Crossland...

Maritime watercolor, an accurately detailed depiction of steamship "Nellie" en route on the water, complete with tiny silhouetted passenger figur...