J.P. Palmer

Early 20th Century Meadow & Trees Landscape Watercolor

1908

Farmhouse by the Sea - Original Watercolor on Paper Tranquil landscape of a seaside farmhouse on the sand surrounded by coastal plants, in soft neutral watercolors. A distant ocean s...

Modernist 20th Century Rocky Plein Air California Landscape A vibrant watercolor seascape by California artist Lucile Marie Johnston (1907-1994,...

Through The Trees - Original Watercolor on Paper Original watercolor painting depicting a grove of vibrant green trees by Bertram Spencer (American, 1918-1992). Presented in a lig...

Mid Century Modern Farmhouse Landscape in Watercolor and Ink on Paper Bright, modern landscape by Robin Gay McCline (American, 1928-2008). A line of trees and buildings runs across ...

A rare and atmospheric work from Carl Oscar Borg’s early years in Sweden, this evocative gouache captures the tradition of Easter fires (påskeldar) in the rural region of Dalsland. A...

A watercolor depicting a mountain view and the lake Gruyère, (Lac De La Gruyère) in Switzerland by the American Impressionist and Tonalist Mary Rogers Williams (1857–1907). Signed M.R. Williams. On the verso, the artist wrote: ‘Painted in Gruyère July 1902.’ This is a newly discovered work by a rare woman artist who seldom appears on the art market. Small in scale, yet rich in atmosphere, power, and depth—a genuine little gem. Mary Rogers Williams was born in 1857, in Hartford, Connecticut, the fifth of six children to a local baker. Orphaned by the age of fourteen, she pursued art with remarkable determination, studying at Hartford’s Decorative Art Society and the Art Students League in New York under William Merritt Chase. Her early mentor was James Wells Champney. In 1888, she joined Smith College as associate professor of art, where she taught for nearly twenty years to help support her family. Alongside her academic career, she maintained a serious and evolving artistic practice, though much of it was pursued within the limitations of her era’s gender roles and financial pressures. Her work is often classified as a blend of Tonalism and Impressionism—movements that were just taking shape during her lifetime. Tonalists used subdued palettes to evoke mood rather than detail, while Impressionists leaned toward brighter colors and broader subjects. Williams, working independently of art-world factions, forged a style rooted in mood, light, and atmosphere. She painted luminous pastels, watercolors, and oils—portraits, landscapes, and intimate studies of daily life. Despite knowing figures like Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam, she rarely aligned herself with any artistic “school” and found many male contemporaries pretentious or repetitive. She famously dropped out of Whistler’s Paris school, calling him “a pompous fop surrounded by fawners.” Though Mary Cassatt and Williams were both American Impressionists living in Paris, they never met—Cassatt enjoyed wealth and elite circles, while Williams was a self-reliant educator without patrons. Williams traveled extensively throughout Europe—from the Arctic Circle to the ruins south of Naples—often alone or with her sister. She bicycled through fjords, hiked to medieval towns, and visited chateaux and harbors, all while sketching prolifically. She is likely the only 19th-century woman artist whose travels and daily life can be traced in such vivid, personal detail: what she ate, how she felt about fellow travelers, what she paid for trams, how the air smelled, what she wore, and how she missed home. She documented everything—museum visits, church restorations, conversations with hotel guests, and her frustrations with men’s treatment of women artists. These letters, rediscovered in 2012 in a family boathouse, provide an extraordinary insight into not only her art but the intellectual and emotional texture of her life. Her writings reveal not only artistic insight but the immense workload she carried. At Smith, she taught studio art and art history, organized faculty events, curated student exhibitions, wrote essays, handled housework, and even cooked and cleaned for her own lodgings. On vacations, she cooked for her family; in Europe, she waxed floors, painted walls, repaired clothing, and stoked fires—all while maintaining her painting and travel schedule. Unlike many of her male peers, she had no assistants, no household staff, and little inherited wealth. Yet, as her letters reveal, she never saw herself as a victim—she relished challenges and even the absurdities of her era, from Italian waiters pushing marriage to department heads at Smith dismissing women’s artistic capacity. Despite these challenges, Williams exhibited widely during her lifetime: Paris Salon (1899) National Academy of Design (1903–04) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, Art Association of Indianapolis, and more. She was praised in The New York Times, Hartford Courant, and Springfield Republican, and compared by peers to figures like Emily Dickinson—another New England woman of quiet yet profound artistic power. But unlike Dickinson, Mary Williams...

Born on a small island near Martha's Vineyard, R. Swain Gifford and his family moved to the New Bedford, Massachusetts, area when he was two years old. The Dutch marine painter Alber...

Landscape watercolor by Allen Tucker of an oak tree. This piece, along with several others, was gifted to Una Brage, a friend of the artist in the 1930s. More 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...