Illustration Board Figurative Paintings

Monet Tending His Garden with Calla lily Impressionist Acrylic Kimberlee Kuwica Monet in his garden, a stylized figurative work by California Visionary artist Kimberlee Kuwica (Ameri...

Two pelicans standing on posts by an unknown artist (20th Century). One pelican is looking up at the sky, the other down at the water. Both are perched atop a group of posts in the w...

Standard Oil Refineries, Richmond, 1922 by Joseph Costanzo (Italian/American, 1883-1960. An Industrial hum is clearly visible in this first hand account of the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond California. Smokes stacks are belching smoke, working climbing on to storage tanks and trucks going about the days work. All in the name of the new oil industry in California. Joe worked for the Standard Oil Company of California for a time before retiring in Santa Cruz. Image, 15.5"H x 32.25"W x 2"D Standard Oil Refineries, Richmond, 1920 With its state-of-art equipment for refining crude oil and prime location, this refinery became a valuable asset of the Standard Oil Co., employing 1,700 workers by 1915. Courtesy of the Richmond Public Library From 1910-1920, the number of automobiles, trucks, tractors and aircraft increased significantly, generating enormous demand for gasoline and petroleum products, especially in the western U.S. where the population had increased 30%. With its plentiful crude oil, state-of-art equipment, prime location, and dedicated work force, the Richmond Refinery became an increasingly valuable asset of the Standard Oil Company. By 1915 the refinery employed 1,700 workers. Joseph Joe Costanzo“Red Hen...

Bold seascape by Edmond Donald Mauberret (American, 1921-2004). From a vantage point high on the coast, the viewer overlooks cliffs on the edge of the Pacific as the artist sits on the rocks painting the view. Dark blue seas crash into the coast, creating frothy white foam. A few people are walking and sitting along the coast. Signed "Edmond D. Mauberret" in the lower right corner. Presented in a wood frame. Board size: 19"H x 22.5"W Frame size: 22.5"Hx 26"W Edmond Donald Mauberret (American, 1921-2004) was born in San Francisco, California on May 29, 1921, to parents of French descent. His father, Edmond Mauberret, owned the Hotel Richelieu, now called the La Quinta. His mother, Helene Miguet, owned a well-known society boutique, Marie et Helene. It was at his mother's boutique, where he used to while away the hours painting, that his artistic talents were discovered. A commercial artist saw one of his landscapes and recommended him to the San Francisco Institute of Fine Arts, where, at 13, he became the youngest art student to attend the academy. He graduated from Galileo High School in 1940. He served in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Corps. In 1951, after a brief stint as a graphic artist, Mr. Mauberret joined the Marin County...

James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ca. 1925. Ink and pencil on illustration board, image measures 9 x 15 inches; 17 x 21 inches framed. Signed lower right. Annotated with name of subject on verso in pencil by the artist. Very good condition with no damage or conservation. Original glue residue in margins. An outstanding a rare example of Flagg's sketch portraiture. While the artist is most famous for illustration work, Flagg loved to make quick sketches of famous society friends and patrons. The piece clearly belongs to the latter category with looser brushwork suggesting famous contemporary American portrait painters that he admired. The image documents a quiet, intimate moment in the lives of both artist and subject. Provenance: John Francis Lee, former president of Stoney Brook College, Long Island, (1918-1999). Annotated on verso in blue ink. James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) During a long and fruitful career, James Montgomery Flagg produced an immense and varied amount of artwork. A popular social gadabout and the life of a party, Flagg was constantly sketching friends, celebrities and politicians and always surrounded by beautiful models and sycophants. He clearly enjoyed his own ability at humor and satire as well as his fame as an illustrator. By the age of twelve he was selling his drawings and cartoons to St. Nicholas magazine. At the age of fifteen, he was a staff artist for both Judge and Life magazines, two of the nation¹s most successful periodicals. Flagg grew up in the period when pen and ink ruled and printing technology was limited. When halftone printing was accepted as a reproduction process, Flagg created images of beautiful women, which supplanted the portrait artists of previous decades. It is true that Gibson had created a sensation with his early notion of a beautiful American girl, but Christy, Fisher and Flagg did likewise, with each of them producing early versions of coffee table books and magazine illustrations heralding a new world of fashion, styles, and beauty. The society portraits created by John Singer Sargent were thusly thrown asunder and whole new prototypes of American beauty were created-bustles and chastity were disappearing and the illustrators ushered in a new era. Flagg studied at the Art Students League in New York City (1894-1898), and then in London and Paris (1898-1900). He was an active member of the Society of Illustrators, The Players Club, The Dutch Treat Club, and the Lotos Club-where he personally hung his poignant editorial cartoons in the grille room. In 1898, he went to England to further his art studies and enrolled at the Herkomer School in Bushey, Hertfordshire an art school founded by Professor Hubert von Herkomer, the art critic who heralded Maxfield Parrish¹s work in critical reviews. Upon his return from Europe, he created a comic strip 'Nervy Nat,' which gained immediate popularity winning him the commission for P.G. Wodehouse's stories where he created the visual characterization for the character 'Jeeves'. The first book he illustrated was Yankee Girls Abroad (1900), with pretty gals abounding who were superficially similar to The Christy Girl and Fisher's American Girl. Flagg's notion was yet another example of what American's thought our women should look like. His commissions ranged from cartoons, posters, magazine covers and inside illustrations, and advertisements to serious portraits, which were exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1900 alongside the academic painters from the Academie Julian. Books illustrated include An Orchard Princess, Simon the Jester, City People, Brinkley Manor, The Adventures of Kitty Cobb and in 1932 the seminal pin-up work, Virgins in Cellophane. In 1946, his published his autobiography, Roses and Buckshot. The magazines with his works included Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Hearst's International, Judge Magazine, Liberty, Life, McClures Magazine, Photoplay, Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, The American Weekly, Women¹s Home Companion, and many others. Flagg was a favorite illustrator of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst and due to their relationship he gained numerous other commissions including humorous short story illustrations (which he enjoyed doing most), and rapid portrait studies of Hearst's friends. Most of his sitters were generally upper-class society scions and celebrities including: actor John Barrymore and his sister Ethel, cartoonist Ham Fisher, unique humorist Rube Goldberg, and illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. However, James Montgomery Flagg remains best known for a single painting, his iconic illustration of Uncle Sam proclaiming, 'I Want You' for a US Army Recruiting...

Beautiful figurative seascape depicting a girl in period dress seated on jetty rocks, looking out at a rowboat on the water, by Pacific Northwest artist Julian Joseph...

Signed upper right, 'H. Winslow' for Helen Winslow (American, 1916-2008) and painted circa 1965. Born in North Carolina, Helen Winslow first studied und...

Inscribed, verso, on old label, 'Marjory Pegram, Carmel, Calif. circa 1940' for Marjory Pegram (American, 1883-1972) and painted circa 1940; additionally inscribed 'M. Peagram'. Born in New York, Marjory Pegram first studied at the Cooper Union...

David Levine (1926-2009). In Contemplation, 1955. Oil on panel, 6.5 x 7.5 inches; 10.5 x 11.5 inches framed.. Davis Galleries label affixed en verso. Excellent condition with no damage or restoration. Unsigned. Biography: Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest caricaturists of the second half of the 20th century, David Levine was best known for his drawings for the New York Review of Books (which spanned more than 40 years), Esquire, Time magazine and The New Yorker. Awarded numerous prizes for his work, which was reproduced worldwide and influenced a generation of international cartoonists, he was also an accomplished painter in watercolours and oils. David Julian Levine was born on 20 December 1926 in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Harry Levine, who ran a small clothing factory specialising in women’s dresses from a loft on Sixth Avenue, and Lena Isaacson, a nurse. Though not an academically strong pupil (“I didn’t do anything in school – I studied volleyball”), he excelled in drawing and wanted to become a comic-book artist like Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit). At the age of nine he won a contest sponsored by Walt Disney to draw the character Goofy and was invited to audition as an animator for the Disney studio in Los Angeles. However, his parents decided against this and after he left Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, they sent him to study painting at the Tyler School of Fine Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia (1944). After spending his national service (1945-6) in the US Army, serving as a cartographer in Egypt, he returned to complete his degree and take an art teacher’s certificate (1946-9). He then studied with the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hoffman at the Eighth Street School of Painting in Manhattan (1949). Intending to become a professional painter, his first works (mostly watercolours) were scenes of pressers, cutters, fitters, sewing-machine operators and others in his father’s factory and seaside panoramas of bathers at nearby Coney Island. He began to exhibit regularly at the Davis Gallery in New York from 1954 (until 1963), winning four awards for his paintings from the National Academy of Art & Design. In 1958 he and fellow artist Aaron Shikler (whose portrait of John F Kennedy hangs in the White House), formed the Painting Group, which met regularly over the next 50 years to paint life models (US Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor famously sat for them in 2006). Failing to make a sufficient income from his paintings alone, he also began to work as an illustrator for Gasoline Retailer and other publications. In addition, he published a series of Christmas cards based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and illustrated books such as Elizabeth Kirtland’s children’s fantasy Buttons in the Back (1958). His first drawings for Esquire appeared in 1958 and over the following years Levine produced more than 1000 illustrations for the magazine. However, his big break came in 1963 when he was invited to join the New York Review of Books as staff artist, shortly after it was founded. In all he drew nearly 4000 caricatures (including covers) for the Review – earning at his peak more than $12,000 a month from this publication alone – until ill health and failing eyesight (macular degeneration) forced him to retire 44 years later in April 2007 (his last original drawing for the Review was of the novelist Howard Norman). Levine also worked for The New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, New York Magazine, Time magazine (nearly 100 drawings including some notable covers), Newsweek (including covers), The New Yorker (more than 70 drawings), Harper’s, The Nation, Playboy and others. In addition, his caricatures appeared in many international publications, including The Sunday Times, the Observer, Daily Telegraph magazine and others in the UK. Though he drew numerous global public figures in politics, the arts, sport, current affairs and history – from Winston Churchill, De Gaulle and Gandhi to Castro, Mao Zedong and Brezhnev – he was perhaps best known for his portraits of US celebrities, especially presidents. He produced more than 60 caricatures of Richard Nixon for the New York Review of Books alone (notably as Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg in the 1954 film version of The Caine Mutiny) and his many (40 plus) portraits of Lyndon B Johnson for the Review included his most famous work, criticising LBJ’s role in the Vietnam War. Based on a celebrated 1966 press photograph of Johnson proudly pointing at the scar on his stomach after a recent gall-bladder operation, in Levine’s version the scar is made to resemble the outline of Vietnam. This drawing appears on the cover of Levine’s last book, American Presidents (2008), which features caricatures of US leaders over half a century (a tie-in exhibition was held at the New York Public Library the same year). Other books by Levine include A Summer Sketchbook (1963), The Man from M.A.L.I.C.E. [Movies, Art, Literature and International Conmen’s Establishment] (1966), Pens and Needles: Literary Caricatures (1969), Caricatures (1969), Identikit (1969), No Known Survivors (1970) and The Arts of David Levine (1978). He also illustrated a number of works by others including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1963), Vance Nye Bourjaily’s The Unnatural Enemy (1963), William Hauff’s The Heart of Stone (1964), James Playsted Wood’s The Snark Was a Boojum: A Life of Lewis Carroll (1966), Albert E Kahn’s Smetana and the Beetles: A Fairy Tale for Adults (1967), Harold Hayes’ (ed.) Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (1969), John Osborne’s The Fifth Year of the Nixon Watch (1974), The Fables of Aesop (1975), Joseph Moses’ The Great Rain Robbery (1975), Judy Jones and William Wilson’s An Incomplete Education (1987) and Robert B Silvers and Barbara Epstein’s (eds) A Middle East Reader (1991). Many of his drawings also appeared in calendars and as mousepads, postcards and other merchandise produced by the New York Review of Books. Influenced by the Punch cartoonists Richard Doyle and Sir John Tenniel, as well as the Frenchmen Gustave Doré and Honoré Daumier and his fellow countryman Thomas Nast, his use of large heads on small bodies ultimately derived from the style popularised by the 19th-century Parisian André Gill...