17th Century Italian School

'St. Peter Giving Communion', Old Master, Milanese Figural, Romanesque, Baroque

Circa 1660

Signed lower left, 'F. Laval' for Fernand Laval (French, 1886-1966) and dated 1948. Born in Dordogne, Fernand Laval arrived in Paris at the age of 26 to study art and, during the e...

Signed lower right, 'H.E. Sanders' for H. Evan Sanders (American, 1914-1996) and painted circa 1975. Born in Colorado, Evan Sanders moved to Fresno, California at an early age. He began his career as an artist in the late 1920's and continued to paint and show his work professionally for over sixty years. A long time resident of Long Beach, he exhibited widely and with success including with the Huntington...

Signed verso, 'Ant McNaught', (American, born 1952), dated September 2022 and inscribed 'After Derain'. This California Post-Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist artist studied ...

An early twentieth-century, American Impressionist School oil landscape showing a sunlit view of a woman standing on a country road lined with eucalyptus trees. The work of an anonym...

Signed lower right, 'V. Rorup' for Viggo Julius Rorup (Danish, 1903-1971) and dated 1966. A large and lyrical spring landscape showing white apple-blossoms contrasted against a cora...

Signed lower right, 'Agostinelli' for Mario Agostinelli (Peruvian-American, 1915-2000) and dated 1956; additionally titled, lower left, 'Rue Royale, Paris'. Displayed in a substantia...

Artist: Bernhard Buter (1883-1959) German Title: Rhinish Landscape Medium: Oil on Canvas Dimensions: Framed 19” x 21” , Unframed 11 x 13” Bernhard Buter paints agrarian landscapes i...

Rene Genis (French 1922-2004) “Les Falaise Normande” / The Cliffs of Normand. A sea scape with high cliffs, the beach, and two fishermen. The cliffs are in browns, tans and olives a...

Rene Genis (French 1922-2004) Monument Valley. 1967. Beautiful oranges, browns, greens against a turquoise blue sky. Oil on canvas, laid on mat. Si...

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 was one of the greatest disasters in the city’s history. The City, with its wooden houses crowded together in narrow streets, was a natural fire risk, and predictions that London would burn down became a shocking reality. The fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, an area near the Thames teeming with warehouses and shops full of flammable materials, such as timber, oil, coal, pitch and turpentine. Inevitably the fire spread rapidly from this area into the City. Our painting depicts the impact of the fire on those who were caught in it and creates a very dramatic impression of what the fire was like. Closer inspection reveals a scene of chaos and panic with people running out of the gates. It shows Cripplegate in the north of the City, with St Giles without Cripplegate to its left, in flames (on the site of the present day Barbican). The painting probably represents the fire on the night of Tuesday 4 September, when four-fifths of the City was burning at once, including St Paul's Cathedral. Old St Paul’s can be seen to the right of the canvas, the medieval church with its thick stone walls, was considered a place of safety, but the building was covered in wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of being restored by the then little known architect, Christopher Wren and caught fire. Our painting seems to depict a specific moment on the Tuesday night when the lead on St Paul’s caught fire and, as the diarist John Evelyn described: ‘the stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with the firey redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ Although the loss of life was minimal, some accounts record only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was shocking – some four hundred and thirty acres, about eighty per cent of the City proper was destroyed, including over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-nine churches, and fifty-two Guild Halls. Thousands were homeless and financially ruined. The Great Fire, and the subsequent fire of 1676, which destroyed over six hundred houses south of the Thames, changed the appearance of London forever. The one constructive outcome of the Great Fire was that the plague, which had devastated the population of London since 1665, diminished greatly, due to the mass death of the plague-carrying rats in the blaze. The fire was widely reported in eyewitness accounts, newspapers, letters and diaries. Samuel Pepys recorded climbing the steeple of Barking Church from which he viewed the destroyed City: ‘the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw.’ There was an official enquiry into the causes of the fire, petitions to the King and Lord Mayor to rebuild, new legislation and building Acts. Naturally, the fire became a dramatic and extremely popular subject for painters and engravers. A group of works relatively closely related to the present picture have been traditionally ascribed to Jan Griffier...

Zygmund Jankowski (1925–2009) painted traditional subjects with exuberant irreverence for traditional rules of color, composition, and perspective. He disparaged imitation and deligh...

Flat Ledge Quarry is one of the many granite quarries in Rockport MA, which actively produced granite for cobblestones until the early 20th century, when asphault became the preferre...