Art by Medium: Watercolor

Turkish and American is a Watercolour Drawing realized by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in 1945. Hand signed on the lower margin. Good condition on a yellowed paper. Mino Maccari (Si...

Superfluous is a sketch for a cover of the Magazine "Il Superfluo Illustrato" by Ennio Flaiano, realized in Pen and Watercolor by Mino Maccari (1924-198...

An early 1940s fashion study featuring a hat advertisement for Chicago's most notable department store, Marshall Field & Company. Provenance: Cornelia Steckl-Jurin, Founder of the...

Seductive is a Pencil and Watercolor Drawing realized by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in the 1940s. Hand-signed on the lower. Good condition with foxing. Mino Maccari (Siena, 1924-Ro...

The Couple is a watercolor Drawing realized by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in 1940 ca. Hand-signed on the lower margin. Good condition. Mino Maccari (Siena, 1924-Rome, June 16, 1989...

An early 1940s fashion study featuring a woman seated with hat and gloves. Provenance: Cornelia Steckl-Jurin, Founder of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art Institute of...

Figure is a watercolor Drawing realized by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in 1945. Hand-signed on the lower, with another drawing on the rear. Good conditions. Mino Maccari (Siena, 192...

An early 1940s fashion study featuring a hat advertisement for a hat, suit and purse. Provenance: Cornelia Steckl-Jurin, Founder of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art...

Smokers is a Watercolor drawing realized by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in the 1940s. Monogrammed on the lower. Good condition. Mino Maccari (Siena, 1924-Rome, June 16, 1989) was an...

This lovely watercolor painting on Arches paper features a landscape view in Provence. This typical Mediterranean country house in the south of France has a veranda and the Saint Vic...

Good wholesome mid-century Americana is on full display in the joyous illustration that depicts a red horsedrawn sled of merrymaking folks being rreated at an inn. Signed lower left ...

Gouache and watercolor on paper painting, painted in 1948 by Mary Chenoweth (1918-1999). Signed and dated by the artist in the lower right corner. Depicting an abstracted landscape o...

Julia (Elsie Julia Miller) Schleicher (Canadian/American, 1916-1988) Woman Tennis Player Pastel and gouache on board 18 x 13-5/8 inches (45.7 x 34.6 cm) S...

Generations ahead of the pack, little-known Lorraine Fox developed a simple, charming and flat style that is emulated today but not equaled. Her work is rooted in sound academic trai...

In this composite image Naval Artist Arthur Beaumont shows us the final moments of the German battleship PRINZ EUGEN, as the ghosts of her former comra...

Irish Sea Watercolor, 1947 Signed and dated by the artist lower right Condition: Excellent Image/Sheet size: 12 x 18 inches Provenance: Estate of the Artist ...

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Society Satirical Cartoon, ca. 1940s. Gouache on heavy illustration paper, image measures 17 x 14 inches; 23 x 20 inches in matting. Signed lower left. Very good condition but matting panel should be replaced. Unframed. Provenance: Ethel Maud Mott Herman, artist (1883-1984), West Orange NJ. For two decades, she drew almost 600 cartoons for The New Yorker with female characters that commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony. In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross, the founder of a new magazine called The New Yorker, was looking for cartoonists who could create sardonic, highbrow illustrations accompanied by witty captions that would function as social critiques. He found that talent in Barbara Shermund. For about two decades, until the 1940s, Shermund helped Ross and his first art editor, Rea Irvin, realize their vision by contributing almost 600 cartoons and sassy captions with a fresh, feminist voice. Her cartoons commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony, using female characters who critiqued the patriarchy and celebrated speakeasies, cafes, spunky women and leisure. They spoke directly to flapper women of the era who defied convention with a new sense of political, social and economic independence. “Shermund’s women spoke their minds about sex, marriage and society; smoked cigarettes and drank; and poked fun at everything in an era when it was not common to see young women doing so,” Caitlin A. McGurk wrote in 2020 for the Art Students League. In one Shermund cartoon, published in The New Yorker in 1928, two forlorn women sit and chat on couches. “Yeah,” one says, “I guess the best thing to do is to just get married and forget about love.” “While for many, the idea of a New Yorker cartoon conjures a highbrow, dry non sequitur — often more alienating than familiar — Shermund’s cartoons are the antithesis,” wrote McGurk, who is an associate curator and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. “They are about human nature, relationships, youth and age.” (McGurk is writing a book about Shermund. And yet by the 1940s and ’50s, as America’s postwar focus shifted to domestic life, Shermund’s feminist voice and cool critique of society fell out of vogue. Her last cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1944, and much of her life and career after that remains unclear. No major newspaper wrote about her death in 1978 — The New York Times was on strike then, along with The Daily News and The New York Post — and her ashes sat in a New Jersey funeral...

Gouache on board Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved t...

Gouache on paper Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved t...

Gouache on artist board Provenance: Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett mor...

Frame Sz: 20 5/8"H x 25 1/8"W Art Sz: 13 1/2"H x 17 7/8"W Provenance: The Collection of Susie Hilfiger at Denbigh Farm The greatest stakes-winning Maryland-...

Goauche Provenance: Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved to be at the artistic zeitgeist in a career that stretched for more than 75 years. Born in 1889, Scarlett had his first retrospective by 1928. He subscribed fully to the modernist credo. Interviewed at the time, he said: "If a futuristic painting...

Lady with the Military Medals Benjamin Benno, American (1901–1980) Date: 1940 Watercolor and ink on paper, signed and dated Size: 24 x 14.38 in. (60.96 x 36.51 cm) Frame Size: 27 x 2...

Gouache on artist board Provenance: Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett mor...

Gouache on artist board Provenance: Collection of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett...

My Room is a Drawing on paper realized by an Anonymous artist in the 1948. Watercolour on paper. Hand-signed, illegible, dated. Good conditions. Included a Passepartout: 47 x 59 c...

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by: Lloyd R. Ney (1893 – 1964) Called “Bill” by his friends, Lloyd Ney was one of the pioneers of Modernist art in New Hope. Ne...

Padern, born in Colera in 1924, settled in Blanes after the Civil War, a municipality that in 1998 granted the title of adoptive son. After a trip to South America, he returned to E...

Work on paper Golden wooden frame with glass pane 42 x 32 x 2.5 cm

Watercolor on paper

French female illustrator Geneviève Thomas renders a highly stylized fashion illustration set against a seamless red background, The model is wearin...

Fantasia was released by Walt Disney Production in 1940. Disney settled on the film's concept as work neared completion on The Sorcerer's Apprentice. As production costs grew highe...

This is an original Post-war illustration drawing, hand-painted with gouache on Arches Velum paper by French artist C. Villars (France - 20th Century). The poster project features a young woman in a bikini swimsuit sitting on a globe. She holds in her hand a toy in the shape of an airplane on the end of a string. In the background on the terrestrial globe, the connections between France and the countries of South America are guessed. The drawing was created for an airline company named STAR. The illustration is signed C. Villars in the bottom left corner. This image was probably later printed in a larger size for ad posters...

This is an original Post-war illustration drawing, hand-painted with gouache on Arches Velum paper by French artist C. Villars (France - 20th Century). The poster project features a woman in travel clothes with all her suitcases sitting on a magic carpet. Below the carpet, we guess a plane in the air. The drawing was created for an airline company named STAR. The illustration is signed C. Villars in the bottom left corner. This image was probably later printed in a larger size for ad posters...

The mid-century glamour portrait of an elegant, long-necked woman in silhouette with a straw sun hat. Signed and dated Grafstrom Palm Beach 1947 - Condition is good with some scatter...

This is an original Post-war illustration drawing, hand-painted with gouache on Arches Velum paper by French artist C. Villars (France - 20th Century). The poster project features an airplane with a map book in the background, with emphasis on France and South American countries, on the side we see the hands of a man and a woman. The drawing was created for an airline company named STAR. The illustration is signed C. Villars in the bottom left corner. This image was probably later printed in a larger size for ad posters...

This is an original Post-war illustration drawing, hand-painted with gouache on Arches Velum paper by French artist C. Villars (France - 20th Century). The poster project features an airplane propeller and the earth in the background, with emphasis on France and South American countries. The drawing was created for an airline company named STAR. The illustration is signed C. Villars in the bottom left corner. This image was probably later printed in a larger size for ad posters...

"Abstractions" by American modernist painter Leonard Nelson is a double sided work on paper. The front is 10.5" x 7.5" and the back side drawing is 10" x 6.75". Both sides are signed and dated "Nelson 46", and the artworks are matted and framed behind glass. Leonard Nelson (1912 - 1993) Born in Camden, New Jersey, Nelson applied for a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, regardless of having no portfolio. He was persuasive enough to be given one semester and subsequently was awarded an Academy fellowship to study painting. Nelson went on to earn the Academy's prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship award in 1939. He studied at PAFA from 1936 - 1940 with, among others, Henry McCarter...

Mary Petty gained fame as a cover artist for The New Yorker, illustrating a fictional upper-class Manhattan family called the Peabodys. One of the main char...

*UK BUYERS WILL PAY AN ADDITIONAL 20% VAT ON TOP OF THE ABOVE PRICE Moroccan Dancer by Georges Manzana Pissarro (1871-1961) Watercolour, coloured crayon and pencil 26.3 x 20.2 cm ( ...

Work on paper without frame

MEDIUM: Original Watercolor Concept Painting PRODUCTION: Fantasia, 1940 SIZE: 10" x 12" SIGNATURE: Sylvia Holland FRAMING: Framing included in Pricing SKU: CCV1640 ABOUT THE ART: ...

MEDIUM: Original Pastel Concept on Paper PRODUCTION: Fantasia, 1940 SIZE: 10" x 12.5" SIGNATURE: Sylvia Holland FRAMING: Framing included in Pricing SKU: CCV1641 ABOUT THE ART: (Sylvia Holland (1900 - 1974) Beautiful pre-production sketch by Sylvia Moberly-Holland, one of Disney's first female animators. Sylvia originally worked as an architect before gaining experience as an animator with Universal Studios...

Dove, Arthur (American, 1880-1946). CENTERPORT SERIES #23. Watercolor on paper, 1940. Signed "Dove," at the lower center. Labels identifying the work on the backing paper of the ...

Basketball Player Gouache on card stock, c. 1940 Signed by the artist in ink lower center A study for the fresco mural in the Social Security Buildin...

Bungalow (fauvist painting of New York scene) 1940's. image is 10X 11.5 inches. Hand signed lower right Country Scene Samuel Grunvald was a Hungarian born American WPA artist known for abstract, landscape and seascape paintings. Arrived in the USA from Hungary in 1921 and settled in New York City where he studied at the Art Students League. Grunvald worked for the Federal Art Project, taught at Colony House in NYC. Member: Art Guild, Watercolor Society, New York Watercolor Club. exhibited at Montross Gallery, NYC, World House Galleries, NYC, Leonard Hutton Gallery, NYC, Associated American Artists Gallery and the A.C.A. Gallery. Gunvald's work spanned many modern American movements from the WPA to Abstract Expressionist painting. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society and the Brooklyn Society of Artists. He exhibited with both of these organizations and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He was involved the the WPA being a Federal Arts Project artist. A number of prominent Jewish artists participated in this New Deal program among them Ben Shahn, Joseph Solman, William Gropper, Philip Guston Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, Ben Shahn, the Soyers (Isaac, Moses, and Raphael), and many others Grunwald exhibited alongside other popular artists such as Paul Klee, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Charles Burchfield. He also taught and lectured on art and easel painting, Federal Art Project, NYC. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Jewish Museum, New York. Americana. The Catskills became a major resort destination for Jewish New Yorkers in the mid-20th century. Borscht Belt is an informal term for the summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in Sullivan and Ulster counties in upstate New York which were frequented by Ashkenazi Jews. At its peak of popularity, about 500 resorts operated in the region. Later changes in vacationing patterns have led most of those travelers elsewhere, although there are still bungalow communities and summer camps in the towns of Liberty, Bethel, Monticello and Fallsburg catering to Orthodox Jewish populations. Borscht Belt, The term, which derives from the name of a beet soup popular with people of Eastern European origin, can also refer to the Catskill region itself. In August, 1969, the Catskills were the site of a music and art festival in the town of Bethel, which had originally been planned for Woodstock, New York. Thirty-three of the best-known musicians of the era appeared during a sometimes rainy weekend in front of nearly half a million concertgoers. The event, featuring liberal drug use and nudity, exemplified the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Select Exhibitions A.C.A. Gallery Associated American Artists Gallery, 1936-1955 American Watercolor Society, 1932-1942 New York Watercolor Club, 1935-1937 Humanist Art...

Les Mamelles de Tirésias is an original modern artwork realized in 1948 century by Erté (Romain de Tirtoff). Mixed colored gouache on paper. Hand signed on the lower margin. Includes frame Provenance : - Erté personal collection. - Serge Leeman collection. Erté is in charge for the costumes and sets for Les Mamelles de Tirésias. This opera bouffe in two acts by Francis Poulenc based on a play by Guillaume Apollinaire...

Les Mamelles de Tirésias - Choriste - 2nd act is a modern artwork realized in 1947 century by Erté (Romain de Tirtoff). Mixed colored gouache on paper. Hand signed on the lower mar...

The Market, (fauvist painting of NYC scene) 1940's. image is 10X 11.5 inches. Hand signed lower right Lower East Side Tenements Pushcart Market Samuel Grunvald was a Hungarian born American WPA artist known for abstract, landscape and seascape paintings. Arrived in the USA from Hungary in 1921 and settled in New York City where he studied at the Art Students League. Grunvald worked for the Federal Art Project, taught at Colony House in NYC. Member: Art Guild, Watercolor Society, New York Watercolor Club. exhibited at Montross Gallery, NYC, World House Galleries, NYC, Leonard Hutton Gallery, NYC, Associated American Artists Gallery and the A.C.A. Gallery. Gunvald's work spanned many modern American movements from the WPA to Abstract Expressionist painting. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society and the Brooklyn Society of Artists. He exhibited with both of these organizations and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He was involved the the WPA being a Federal Arts Project artist. A number of prominent Jewish artists participated in this New Deal program among them Ben Shahn, Joseph Solman, William Gropper, Philip Guston Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, Ben Shahn, the Soyers (Isaac, Moses, and Raphael), and many others Grunwald exhibited alongside other popular artists such as Paul Klee, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Charles Burchfield. He also taught and lectured on art and easel painting, Federal Art Project, NYC. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Jewish Museum, New York. Americana. Select Exhibitions A.C.A. Gallery Associated American Artists Gallery, 1936-1955 American Watercolor Society, 1932-1942 New York Watercolor Club, 1935-1937 Humanist Art...

La Traviata - Rodolphe - 4th act is a modern artwork realized in 1948 century by Erté (Romain de Tirtoff). Mixed colored gouache on paper. Hand signed on...

Traviata - Rodolphe - 2nd act is a modern artwork realized in 1948 century by Erté (Romain de Tirtoff). Mixed colored gouache on paper. Hand signed on the lower margin. Titled and numbered "9893" on the back. Includes frame Provenance : - Erté personal collection. - Serge Leeman collection. Erté is responsible for the costumes and sets for Les Mamelles de Tirésias. This opera bouffe in two acts by Francis Poulenc based on a play by Guillaume Apollinaire...

Breaking Up of the Penelope watercolor on artists watercolor board, 1942 Signed and dated by the artist lower right (see photo) Exhibitions: Cleveland, OH, The Cleveland Museum of Art, May 3 - June 11, 1944: "The 26th Annual Ehibition of Works by Artists and Craftsmen of the Western Reserve," , (label on verso) Youngstown OH, The Butler Insititue of American Art, 1943: "1943 New Year Show," , (label on verso) "Ed Dobrotka was one of comic-book illustrator Joe Shuster's early assistants. In the studio, he worked on the 'Superman' series, inking the pencils of artists including Shuster, John Sikela, Leo Nowak and Wayne Boring. Dobrotka did do some pencilling of his own, however he returned to inking exclusively in 1945. In the following years, he worked with Sikela on the 'Superboy' series until the 1950s. He has also work on the solo 'Lois Lane...

Work on paper without frame

Spanish and Dutch Soldiers is an original drawing in ink and watercolor realized by Herbert Knotel in 1930/40s. Good condition except for being aged. The artwork is depicted through strong lines in well-balanced conditions. Herbert Knotel was a german artist, son and pupil of the famous uniformologist and military historian Richard Knotel...

Lifting the Torah by Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) Watercolour on paper 67 x 56 cm (26 ³/₈ x 22 inches) Signed upper right, LM Executed in 1943

Original 1940s watercolor on paper painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell portraying a semi abstracted view of Golden Cycle Mill in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Painted in shades of black and gray. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 18 x 19 ½ x 1 ⅜ inches. Image sight size is 8 ⅛ x 9 ⅝ inches. Golden Cycle Mining and Reduction Company was a mining company in Colorado City (now Old Colorado City) in El Paso County, Colorado. Piece is clean and in excellent condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the artist: Artist and teacher, Charles (“Charlie”) Bunnell worked in a variety of styles throughout his career because as an artist he believed, “I’ve got to paint a thousand different ways. I don’t paint any one way.” At different times he did representational landscapes while concurrently involved with semi- or completely abstract imagery. He was one of a relatively small number of artists in Colorado successfully incorporating into their work the new trends emanating from New York and Europe after World War II. During his lifetime he generally did not attract a great deal of critical attention from museums, critics and academia. However, he personally experienced a highpoint in his career when Katherine Kuh, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, personally chose one of his paintings – Why? - for its large exhibition of several hundred examples of abstract and surrealist art held in 1947-48, subsequently including it among the fifty pieces selected for a traveling show to ten other American museums. An only child, Bunnell developed his love of art at a young age through frequent drawing and political cartooning. In high school he was interested in baseball and golf and also was the tennis champion for Westport High School in Kansas City. Following graduation, his father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, in 1916 for a better-paying bookkeeping job, before relocating the following year to Colorado Springs to work for local businessman, Edmond C. van Diest, President of the Western Public Service Company and the Colorado Concrete Company. Bunnell would spend almost all of his adult life in Colorado Springs. In 1918 he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the 62nd Infantry Regiment through the end of World War I. Returning home with a 10% disability, he joined the Zebulon Pike Post No. 1 of the Disabled American Veterans Association and in 1921 used the benefits from his disability to attend a class in commercial art design conducted under a government program in Colorado Springs. The following year he transferred to the Broadmoor Art Academy (founded in 1919) where he studied with William Potter and in 1923 with Birger Sandzén. Sandzén’s influence is reflected in Bunnell’s untitled Colorado landscape (1925) with a bright blue-rose palette. For several years thereafter Bunnell worked independently until returning to the Broadmoor Art Academy to study in 1927-28 with Ernest Lawson, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute where Bunnell himself later taught in the summers of 1929-1930 and in 1940-41. Lawson, a landscapist and colorist, was known for his early twentieth-century connection with “The Eight” in New York, a group of forward-looking painters including Robert Henri and John Sloan whose subject matter combined a modernist style with urban-based realism. Bunnell, who won first-place awards in Lawson’s landscapes classes at the Academy, was promoted to his assistant instructor for the figure classes in the 1928-29 winter term. Lawson, who painted in what New York critic James Huneker termed a “crushed jewel” technique, enjoyed additional recognition as a member of the Committee on Foreign Exhibits that helped organize the landmark New York Armory Exhibition in 1913 in which Lawson showed and which introduced European avant-garde art to the American public. As noted in his 1964 interview for the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, Bunnell learned the most about his teacher’s use of color by talking with him about it over Scotch as his assistant instructor. “Believe me,” Bunnell later said, “[Ernie] knew color, one of the few Americans that did.” His association with Lawson resulted in local scenes of Pikes Peak, Eleven Mile Canyon, the Gold Cycle Mine near Colorado City and other similar sites, employing built up pigments that allowed the surfaces of his canvases to shimmer with color and light. (Eleven Mile Canyon was shown in the annual juried show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1928, an early recognition of his talent outside of Colorado.) At the same time, he animated his scenes of Colorado Springs locales by defining the image shapes with color and line as demonstrated in Contrasts (1929). Included in the Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition in Kansas City in 1929, it earned him the gold medal of the Kansas City Art Institute, auguring his career as a professional artist. In the 1930s Bunnell used the oil, watercolor and lithography media to create a mini-genre of Colorado’s old mining towns and mills, subject matter spurned by many local artists at the time in favor of grand mountain scenery. In contrast to his earlier images, these newer ones – both daytime and nocturnal -- such as Blue Bird Mine essentially are form studies. The conical, square and rectangular shapes of the buildings and other structures are placed in the stark, undulating terrain of the mountains and valleys devoid of any vegetation or human presence. In the mid-1930s he also used the same approach in his monochromatic lithographs titled Evolution, Late Evening, K.C. (Kansas City) and The Mill, continuing it into the next decade with his oil painting, Pikes Peak (1942). During the early 1930s he studied for a time with Boardman Robinson, director of the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1930 to 1947. In 1934 Robinson gave him the mural commission under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) for West Junior High School in Colorado Springs, his first involvement in one of several New Deal art...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943 Watercolor on paper Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada 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...

Work on paper Beige wooden frame with glass pane 48 x 67.3 x 3.3 cm