Sharmistha Kar

Hand Embroidery on Fabric Work of Art, "Flowers For Malala", Sharmistha Kar

2014

Irving Ramsay Wiles, 1861-1948 A Fashionable Young Lady Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 22 5/8 inches Signed lower right: Irving R Wiles Illustrator, teacher, and painter Irving Ramsey Wiles was adept at portraits, figural works, and landscapes characterized by the informal elegance of cosmopolitan American art at the turn of the twentieth century. Wiles received his earliest art instruction from his father, landscape painter and teacher Lemuel M. Wiles (1826–1905), and at the age of eighteen, in 1879, exhibited his first painting at New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design. After one year’s study at the Art Students League in New York, under the influential painter-teachers William Merritt Chase and J. Carroll Beckwith, Wiles went to Paris for further study. He enrolled in the Académie Julian, a popular school among American artists, and then worked in the studio of French academic painter Charles Auguste Émile Durand, known as Carolus-Duran (1837–1917). During his student years Wiles painted watercolor street scenes of Paris, and he also traveled in Italy and in the French countryside. Wiles returned to New York in 1884 and exhibited two of his sketches. These attracted the notice of the art editor of the popular Century Magazine, who asked the young artist to make illustrations for the journal. Wiles’s illustrations appeared in other publications as well, and he also supported himself by teaching at his studio and at his father’s summer art school in upstate New York. Wiles was elected a member of the progressive Society of American Artists and, after one of his works won a prize there, to the National Academy of Design as an associate member; full membership followed in 1897. By that date, Wiles was able to devote himself more fully to portraits and figural compositions in oils, paintings that mark the influence of his teacher Chase, who remained a lifelong friend. Like his mentor, Wiles also worked in watercolor and pastel and belonged to several organizations devoted to those media, which enjoyed revivals in late-nineteenth-century America. He exhibited his work widely and won numerous awards throughout his career. In the late 1890s, Wiles and his father moved their summer classes to Peconic, on the North Fork of New York’s Long Island...

Howard Logan Hildebrandt, 1872-1958 Femme Avec Le Chapeau Plumé, n.d. Oil on canvas 26 ½ x 21 ½ inches Signed (lower right): H L Hildebrandt Provenance Private collection, Detroit A native of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which later merged with Pittsburgh, Howard Logan Hildebrandt achieved prominence in the art world for his portraiture, and counted esteemed doctors, businessmen, musicians and his own artist-colleagues among his numerous sitters. Born in 1872, his life followed a trajectory similar to other young men in an industrial Pennsylvania town when he went to work at a local stained-glass factory during his teenage years. In 1890, Hildebrandt decided to enroll in the National Academy of Design in New York and although his instruction there was brief, lasting only one season, he took classes in both antique and life drawing and must have felt prepared enough to continue his education abroad in the ateliers of Paris. He studied with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian, and also trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, before eventually returning to the United States in the late 1890s to launch his career. Hildebrandt initially settled in Pittsburgh before relocating to New York by 1899, where he briefly kept a studio at the famed Tenth Street Studios and later moved to Carnegie Hall. With the artist’s star rising steadily, Marian A. White, editor of the Fine Arts Journal, praised for his talents in a commentary published in a Pittsburgh weekly: [Hildebrandt] is but thirty-three years of age, yet, through perseverance and industry and an indomitable will, has taken an enviable position among American portrait painters as well as of painters of fisher-folk….Mr. Hildebrandt is an ideal American artist, enthusiastic, energetic, and reveling in painting subjects that are of American type. Beginning in 1905, Hildebrandt was fortunate to gain admittance into newly-constructed buildings being designed specifically for artists rising along New York’s West 67th Street, including the Sixty-Seventh Street Studios, where Henry Ward Ranger and Childe Hassam had spaces, and later the Colonial Studios building, which was commissioned by Robert and Bessie Potter Vonnoh. Counting such luminaries among his neighbors and keeping to an active exhibition schedule, Hildebrandt continued to advance his career. Between 1898 and the mid-1920s, he participated in the annuals of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. Concurrently, he exhibited with the National Academy from the 1890s through the late 1940s, and the titles of paintings shown at these venues suggest the artist was drawn to a variety of themes, from the fishermen and wharves of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to landscape, still life and figural subjects, and finally portraiture, at which he excelled. One of his early portraits, titled Portrait: Miss C and shown at the National Academy in 1902, is thought to be of Cornelia Ellis, a talented miniature painter whom Hildebrandt married that same year. The artist eventually earned the esteemed moniker of National Academician in 1932. In addition to the venues previously mentioned, he showed with the National Arts Club, the Salmagundi Club, the American Watercolor Society and the Allied Artists of America, earning prizes from all four groups. Around 1913, the Hildebrandts began spending summers away from the city in New Canaan, Connecticut, and a few years later built a home on Huckleberry Hill Road near the Silvermine River. Drawn to the idyllic countryside and to the region’s burgeoning artists’ colony founded by sculptor Solon Borglum...

Minimalist Mixed Media Botanical Study Painting Botanical "Branch #1" This mixed media painting by Derek James Lynch (American, b. 1959, 2003 presents a botanical study rendered in ...

Fear of Getting Caught, 2017 Found images transferred to acetate film, collage, acrylics, and graphite. Mixed Media on 100% Cotton Paper Image size: 30 in. H x 22 in. W Frame size: ...