Ernest Lawson

Ernest Lawson Oil on Board Painting Titled "Zoo in Central Park"

1910-1920

Renwick Taylor Above the Bay, 1925 Oil on board Signed (Lower right and verso): RENWICK TAYLOR

Tent City, ca. 1920 Oil on board 16 x 20 inches Signed (lower right and verso): RENWICK TAYLOR

The Bay, ca. 1920 Oil on art board 12 x 15 Signed (verso): Renwick Taylor

William Zorach, 1887-1966 Redwoods, Yosemite Valley, 1920 Watercolor and pencil 15 ¾ x 13 ⅜ inches Signed (at lower right): William Zorach WZorach-7 Provenance: Estate of William Zorach Exhibited: William Zorach, 1887-1996, Sculpture, Drawings and Watercolors, Zabriskie Gallery, New York; Feb. 10 – March 14, 1998. William Zorach was born in Lithuania in 1889, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1893. Settling in Cleveland with his parents, he worked as a lithographer from 1902- 1908, making enough money to study painting with Henry G. Keller at the School of Art. In 1910, Zorach traveled to Paris to study in La Palette, where he was encouraged to develop his own unique style rather than adhere to traditional teachings. Zorach once said, “I began to be conscious of the various modern influences that were invading the art world…I was disturbed and confused, and yet I felt that I was a very young man entering a new age. The forces creating modern art seemed more alive to me than anything I had known or anything being done in America.” 1 Together with his wife Marguerite, William Zorach produced a number of Cubist- style paintings for the American Armory Show of 1913, and the Forum Exhibition in New York in 1916. Around 1917, Zorach followed the lead of cubist artist Pablo Picasso and began experimenting with wood and stone carvings. By 1922, he devoted himself entirely to sculpture, and like Picasso, became fascinated in “primitive art”—the ritual objects and sculpture pieces of Oceanic, Native American and African tribes. Zorach’s work developed in its use of block-like forms with progressive suppression of detail—drawing elements from sources as disparate as the contemporary cubist and modernist movements, and combining them with forms seen in early African sculpture. Though the forms of his sculpture were often abstract, Zorach primarily focused upon a traditional subject matter, producing such well-known sculptures as Young Girl, now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Mother and Child, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, William Zorach is known as one of the earliest and most influential American artists dedicated to direct carving. Zorach also made an impression as a teacher and writer, facilitating a major change in the aesthetic philosophy and technique of sculpture in the United States. During the summers from 1913 to 1922, Zorach and his wife Marguerite painted...

Excellent example of Lawson's work. Wonderful, thick impasto. Signed lower right. 31 x 37 1/4 in excellent condition frame.

Beautiful original plein air impressionistic and realistic style, oil on canvas painting, features a wooded landscape, with magnificent trees which dwarf a woman and child, who are w...

John Edward Costigan Through the Woods Signed lower right Oil on masonite 30 x 27 1/2 inches John Costigan was a self-taught painter and trained printer distinguished by his impres...

Born in Russia, the son of Friede (1878 – 1956) and Benjamin Hoffman (1878 – a. 1942). Benjamin was a dealer in mineral and seltzer water and the family resided on Snediker Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, just down the streetfrom the home where George Gershwin (1898 – 1937) was born. This area of Brooklyn, known as Brownsville, “witnessed the development of one of the largest communities of Eastern European Jewish immigrants during the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20 th century.” Today, little remains of this once thriving Jewish section of Brooklyn, which today houses many commercial and repair businesses. Hoffman studied at the Art Students League of New York, the National Academy of Design and in the art program at Cooper Union. His work at the National Academy received praise, and in 1921 he was awarded the 2nd prize and an honorable mention from the John Armstrong Chaloner Paris Prize Foundation at the National Academy, which allowed the recipient to study in Paris, France for as long as five years. The following year he was awarded the 1 st prize in the competition (with The Reform Advocate running the headline “Young Jew Wins Art Prize”) as well as the Suydam Bronze Medal for his achievements in the Academy’s Men’s Night Class. In 1923 he was residing in Long Branch, New Jersey, when he was awarded 4th place in the Chaloner competition. Early on, Hoffman exhibited his work throughout the city, including in 1925 with the recently organized Society of Independent Artists. He also received several solo exhibitions during the first part of his career, including one at Ferargil Galleries in 1929. In the spring of 1930 a solo exhibition of his portraits, including paintings and drawings, was held at at Babcock Galleries, where a reviewer noted: “Portraiture is obviously Mr. Hoffman’s specialty… his best work is characterized by a sensitive appreciation of character set down in a vigorous decisive statement. Later that same year, in August, he participated in Babcock’s summer exhibition where reviewer Jerome Klein, writing for The Baltimore Sun, felt Hoffman’s and other artists work was already becoming old fashioned, remarking “…if an effort toward accomplishment is to be made, it must be in the language of today. It is for that reason that such contemporaries as Eugene Higgins and Nathan Hoffman, in this show, seem artists of a bygone era…” The onset of the Great Depression appears to have slowed his success, as was the case for many up-and-coming artists. By 1939 Hoffman had become a gallerist in addition to being a painter, operating the collective exhibition space “Sutton Gallery,” which was originally located at 358 East 57th Street. There Hoffman exhibited his own works as well as those created by other prominent New York artists including David Burliuk (1882 – 1967), Charles C. Curran (1861 – 1942), Louis Eilshemius (1864 – 1941), Ann Goldthwaite (1869 – 1944), Maurice Kish (1895 – 1987), Lawrence Lebduska (1894 – 1966), Bradford Perin and Ellis Wilson...