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Style: American Realist
Period: 19th Century
Imperial Woodpecker, aka Ivory Billed Woodpecker, Ornithology, Birdwatching
Located in Grand Rapids, MI
John Livzey Ridgeway (American, 1859-1947)
Signed: J. L. Ridgway
Imperial Woodpecker, aka Ivory Billed Woodpecker, c. 1898
Gifted to Doris Barroll Amos in 1938
Original Watercolo...
Category
Late 19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor, Gouache, Illustration Board
Raising the wreck of the steamer Flushing at Hampton Roads, Virginia
Located in Middletown, NY
Likely a study for an illustration for Harper's Weekly, for which Wiser was a Civil War-era illustrator, focusing on shipwrecks and battles occurring along the mid-Atlantic coast.
...
Category
Mid-19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Archival Paper, Graphite
American Watercolor Angel Painting Stained Glass John La Farge New York 1886
By John La Farge
Located in Portland, OR
An important American watercolor painting study for a stained glass panel, by the celebrated American artist John La Farge (1835-1910), the painting titled an...
Category
1880s American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Paper, Watercolor
Woman with Bicycle: Two Views
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Woman with Bicycle: Two Views
Graphite on paper, c. 1890
Unsigned
Graphite study of standing female nude verso
Provenance:
Rookwood Pottery Factory ...
Category
1890s American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Graphite
William C. Ostrander "A Tragedy in Still Life"
By William Cheesborou Ostrander
Located in San Francisco, CA
William C Ostrander: 1858-1933. Listed NYC and California artist. In the 19th century he taught at Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. His works are very scarce as I could only find o...
Category
19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Ink
Hemlock--Selden's Neck, Lyme, Connecticut
Located in New York, NY
Framed, 5.25 x 8.5 x 1.5 in.
Category
19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor
Figural Studies
By Thomas Sully
Located in New York, NY
Pen and ink on tan laid paper
Category
19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Ink, Laid Paper
African Agapanthus, or Blue Lily, a native of the Cape
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): FJK
Category
Early 19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor
Flox de Pascua-Magnolia (Tropical Trees & Plants)
Located in New York, NY
Watercolor on paper
Category
Mid-19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor
Tree and Fence, East Hartford, Connecticut (New England Landscape)
Located in New York, NY
Watercolor and gouache on paper
Category
Mid-19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor, Gouache
Bitter Quassia, a native of Surinam
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): FJK
Category
Early 19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor
Passaic Falls in New Jersey
By Nicolino V. Calyo
Located in New York, NY
Nicolino Calyo's career reflects a restless spirit of enterprise and adventure. Descended in the line of the Viscontes di Calyo of Calabria, the artist was the son of a Neapolitan army officer. (For a brief biographical sketch of the artist see Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, exhib. cat. [1976], pp. 299-301 no. 257.) Calyo received formal training in art at the Naples Academy. His career took shape amidst the backdrop of the political turbulence of early nineteenth-century Italy, Spain, and France. He fled Naples after choosing the losing side in struggles of 1820-21, and, by 1829, was part of a community of Italian exiles in Malta. This was the keynote of a peripatetic life that saw the artist travel through Europe, to America, to Europe again, and back to America.
Paradoxically, Calyo’s stock-in-trade was close observation of people and places, meticulously rendered in the precise topographical tradition of his fellow countrymen, the eighteenth-century
vedute painters Antonio Canale (called Canaletto) and Francesco Guardi. In search of artistic opportunity and in pursuit of a living, Calyo left Malta, and, by 1834, was in Baltimore, Maryland. He advertised his skills in the April 16, 1835 edition of the Baltimore American, offering "remarkable views executed from drawings taken on the spot by himself, . . . in which no pains or any resource of his art has been neglected, to render them accurate in every particular" (as quoted in The Art Gallery and The Gallery of the School of Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, 350 Years of Art & Architecture in Maryland, exhib. cat. [1984], p. 35). Favoring gouache on paper as his medium, Calyo rendered faithful visual images of familiar locales executed with a degree of skill and polish that was second nature for European academically-trained artists. Indeed, it was the search for this graceful fluency that made American artists eager to travel to Europe and that led American patrons to seek out the works of ambitious newcomers.
On June 16, 1835, the Baltimore Republican reported that Calyo was on his way north to Philadelphia and New York to paint views of those cities. Calyo arrived in New York, by way of Philadelphia, just in time for the great fire of December 1835, which destroyed much of the downtown business district. He sketched the fire as it burned, producing a series of gouaches that combined his sophisticated European painting style with the truth and urgency of on-the-spot observation. Two of his images were given broad currency when William James Bennett reproduced them in aquatint. The New-York Historical Society owns two large Calyo gouaches of the fire, and two others, formerly in the Middendorf Collection, are now in the collection of Hirschl & Adler Galleries. From 1838 until 1855, Calyo listed himself variously in the New York City directories as a painter, a portrait painter, and as an art instructor, singly, and in partnership with his sons, John (1818-1893) and later, the younger Hannibal (1835-1883). Calyo also attracted notice for a series of scenes and characters from the streets of New York, called Cries of New York. These works, which were later published as prints, participate in a time-honored European genre tradition. Calyo’s New York home became a gathering place for European exiles, including Napoleon III. Between 1847 and 1852 Calyo exhibited scenes from the Mexican War and traveled from Boston to New Orleans with his forty-foot panorama of the Connecticut River. Later, he spent time in Spain as court painter to Queen Maria Christina, the result of his continuing European connections, but he was back in America by 1874, where he remained until his death.
The Passaic River rises in the hills just south of Morristown, New Jersey, marking a serpentine eighty-mile course before it empties into Newark Bay. It flows north-northeast to Paterson, where it falls seventy feet in a spectacular cataract before continuing south through Passaic and Newark. William Gerdts, in Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey (1964, pp. 51-2), describes the falls as:
the most important [landscape] subject in New Jersey during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . . The Passaic Falls remained a popular spot, particularly during the romantic period. Indeed, newspapers, periodicals, and gift books contain many accounts of visits to the Falls, sentimental poems written about them or about a loved one visiting the Falls, or even, occasionally, in memory of one who perished in the waters of the Falls — usually intentionally. . . . Waterfalls . . . were popular among travelers in the period and the Passaic Falls were only surpassed by Niagara Falls and Trenton Falls...
Category
19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Paper, Gouache
Franconia, New Hampshire
Located in New York, NY
David Johnson was a stalwart of the New York art world in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the fifty years between 1849 and 1899, Johnson exhibited over fifty paintings at the National Academy of Design, where he was an academician. In 1867, Johnson visited a spot above West Point on the Hudson River to paint a view that had long been a favorite of the landscape artists comprising the so-called “Hudson River School.” John Kensett had painted from the same vantage point ten years earlier, describing the area in a letter of 1854 as being “in the midst of the beautiful highlands of the Hudson, which I think for their peculiar kind of beauty there is nothing to surpass” (Kensett to his uncle, John R. Kensett, March 30, 1854, as quoted in Natalie Spassky and Kathleen Luhrs, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol 2: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1816 and 1845 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985], p. 33). The Kensett painting, now called Hudson River Scene...
Category
19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Paper, Pencil
Storm Sky Over the Farm
By Amos Sangster
Located in Buffalo, NY
An original antique watercolor by American artist Amos Sangster featuring a dramatic allegorical composition and spectacular hand carved frame.
Category
1890s American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor, Paper
Medicine Man
Located in Missouri, MO
Cassilly Adams (American 1843-1921)
"Medicine Man" c. 1860s
Watercolor on Paper
Unsigned
Provenance: Questroyal Gallery, NYC
Site Size: approx. 14.5 x 8....
Category
Mid-19th Century American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings
Materials
Watercolor, Paper
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American Realist drawings and watercolor paintings for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic American Realist drawings and watercolor paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. Not every interior allows for large American Realist drawings and watercolor paintings, so small editions measuring 2.25 inches across are also available. Prices for drawings and watercolor paintings made by famous or emerging artists can differ depending on medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $60 and tops out at $85,000, while the average work sells for $1,781.
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