Graham Smith

Two Anglers On A Riverbed Watercolour & Gouache by Graham Smith

Charming circa 1960's watercolour of a trout angler in a birdseye maple frame Image Sz: 5-5/8"H x 3.25"W Frame Sz: 10.75"H x 8.25"W

Chic hand-coloured fashion plate (with fabric swatch attached) by Givenchy Haute Couture Paris Expressly designed for Nan Kempner, New York society hostess (1930- 2005) Art Sz: 11-3...

Classic original c1960s yachting watercolor signed (LR) Art Sz: 11"H x 20 1/4"W Frame Sz: 18"H x 28"W w/ coral mat & bamboo frame

Sz: 14 1/2"H x 23"W Alexander Warren Montel (1921-2002) Fashion illustrator for House of Lanvin Paris in the 1950s featured in Harper's Bazaar Yellow Circles

Ricard Opisso - Crowd in Barcelona - Watercolor drawing Drawing measurements 19x24 cm. Frame measurements 30x35 cm. Son of Alfredo Opisso y Viñas, journalist, historian and critic, and of Antonia Sala y Gil, his sister Regina Opisso, was also a writer. He comes from an enlightened family full of artists. His paternal grandfather was Josep Opisso y Roig, journalist and director of the Diari de Tarragona, father of the also writers Antonia Opisso y Viña and Antoni Opisso y Viña. His maternal great-grandfather was the painter Pere Pau Montaña, his maternal grandfather the fabulist Felipe Jacinto Sala and his maternal uncle, the painter Emilio Sala y Francés. His nephew was Arturo Llorens y Opisso, a writer better known under his pseudonym Arturo Llopis. Although he was born in Tarragona, his family moved to Barcelona when Opisso was only two years old. In modernist Barcelona at the end of the 19th century, Opisso worked as an assistant to Antonio Gaudí in the works of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona since 1892. He was linked to the group Els Quatre Gats, along with Ramón Casas, Manuel Hugué, Isidre Nonell...

Signed and dated lower right; inscribed, Dated and Signed on Verso Provenance: Ashley John Gallery

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and apprenticed in Boston with Henry Hobson Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury Howard, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals, and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...

Thomas Fransioli’s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, their forms squarely defined by stark light and long shadows. Saturated color permeates every corner of his canvases, from vibrant oranges and greens to smoky terra cottas and granites. Even the trees that line Fransioli’s streets, parks, and squares are sharp and angular, exactly like those in an architect’s elevation rendering. But Fransioli’s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for parked cars and an occasional black cat scurrying across the pavement. People make rare appearances in Fransioli’s compositions, and never does the entropy of a crowd overwhelm their prevailing sense of order and precision. People are implied in a Fransioli painting, but their physical presence would detract from the scene’s bleak and surreal beauty. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli’s artistic viewpoint. The term was first broadly applied to contemporary American art in the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists. As exhibition curator Dorothy Miller noted in her foreword to the catalogue, Magic Realism was a “widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art…. It is limited, in the main, to pictures of sharp focus and precise representation, whether the subject has been observed in the outer world—realism, or contrived by the imagination—magic realism.” In his introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein took the concept a step further: “Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed.” This is Fransioli, in a nutshell. His cityscapes exist in time and space, but certainly not in the manner in which he portrays them. Fransioli—and other Magic Realists of his time—was also the heir to Precisionism, spawned from Cubism and Futurism after the Great War and popularized in the 1920s and early 1930s. While Fransioli may not have aspired to celebrate the Machine Age, heavy industry, and skyscrapers in the same manner as Charles Sheeler, his compositions tap into the same rigid gridwork of the urban landscape that was first codified by the Precisionists. During the 1950s, Fransioli was represented by the progressive Margaret Brown...