Jean-Paul Claveau

Boats in Harbour, Looking out to the Sea, Colourful French Watercolour, The Port

1989

Modern Impressionist gouache on paper view of London and the river Thames by M K Meyer. The painting is signed bottom right and titled to the backboard 'Londres'. Presented in a plai...

A French watercolour on paper landscape by Roger Decaux. The work is signed and dated (as yet undeciphered) bottom right. Presented in a wood frame with cut card mount. A fresh and charming view of trees in a landscape. Decaux has used simple, fluid but strong strokes for this composition. One can feel the influence of 'abstraction of form' that was a part of his later work. The eye is drawn from the trees to the surrounding fields, the touches of colour to the right and then to the silhouette of the hills beyond. The use of watercolour at its best. Roger DECAUX was born in 1919 in Dombasle sur Meurthe in the Lorraine. He studied art in Paris with Gino Severini and Jan Brusselmans...

A pair of French Impressionist landscape views by Georges Planes. (Dimensions given are for each painting.) The first painting: is an early 20th Century drawing and watercolour view...

Watercolour and gouache on paper of sailing boats at a quay side. The painting is signed bottom right but as yet undeciphered and dated 1945. Presented in a patinated wood custom fra...

Oscar Bluemner Sheepshead, Long Island, 1907 Signed with the artist's conjoined initials "OB" and dated "4-30 - 5 - 30" / "Aug 3, 07" Watercolor on paper 6 x 10 inches Provenance: J...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) New York City Skyline View from the East River Watercolor on paper 13 x 19 inches Signed lower left In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

A Colorful, Panoramic Mid-Century Modern View of the famed fishing village (and renowned surfing locale) of Nazaré, Portugal by Rudolph Pen. Painted in the 1960s, this vivid waterco...

A Charming 1940s Watercolor of Mexico with Cathedral and Rooftops by Noted Chicago Artist, Rudolph T. Pen. Most likely completed during the artist's trip to Mexico in 1944 after rec...