Charles Partridge Adams

Untitled (River at Sunset, Colorado)

circa 1900

Original signed framed vintage landscape painting by Charles Partridge Adams (1858-1942) of a Sunset along the Front Range of Colorado (near D...

Original vintage 1940s Modernist Landscape painting of Red Rocks Park, Colorado by Vance Kirkland (1904-1981). Titled, "Ed (Hicks) Sketching at Red Rocks". This regionalist mountain landscape painting is set near Red Rocks Park, Morrison, Colorado (just west of Denver). The figure in the painting is of Kirkland's friend, Ed Hicks. Watercolor on paper, signed and dated, January 1943, lower left and titled verso by the artist. Painted in colors of red, brown, blue, and green. Presented in a custom gold leaf frame, outer dimensions measure 34 ¾ x 42 ⅞ x 1 ¼ inches. Painting as shown within the mat and frame measures 21 x 29 inches. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado About the Artist: Variously referred to as the “Father of Modern Colorado Painting,” “Dean of Colorado Artists” and “Colorado’s pre-eminent artist,” Kirkland was an inventive, visionary painter who spent fifty-two years of his fifty-four year career in Denver. Of the approximately 1,200 paintings he created, about 550 from the first half of his career (1927-1953) are water-based media: acquarelle, gouache, casein and egg tempera, with a few oils. In the latter half of his career (1953-1981) he used oil and his unique oil and water mixture. He also produced five hundred drawings and some ten prints, mostly lithographs on stone, while also engaged in teaching full-time for most of the period. To show people “something they have never seen before and new ways to look at things,” he felt he needed to preserve his artistic freedom. Consequently, he chose to spend his entire professional career in Denver far removed from the established American art centers in the East and Midwest. “By minding my own business and working on my own,” he said, “I think it was possible to develop in this part of the country… I’ve developed my kind of work [and] I think my paintings are stronger for having worked that way.” The geographical isolation resulting from his choice to stay in Colorado did not impede his creativity, as it did other artists, but in fact contributed to his unique vision. The son of a dentist, who was disappointed with his [son’s] choice of art as a career, Kirkland flunked freshman watercolor class in 1924 at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) for putting colors into his landscapes that did not exist in nature and for competing colors. Not dissuaded, he won first prize for his watercolors in his junior and senior years. [While in Cleveland,] he studied with three influential teachers. Henry Keller, included in the prestigious New York Armory Show in 1913, introduced him to designed realism which he later used in his Colorado landscapes in the 1930s and 1940s. His other teachers were Bill Eastman, who studied with Hans Hofmann and appreciated all the new movements in modern art, and Frank Wilcox, a fine watercolorist. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art, Kirkland concurrently took liberal arts courses at Western Reserve and the Cleveland School of Education and taught two freshman courses in watercolor and design, receiving his diploma in painting from the school in 1927 by doing four years of work in three. The following year he received a Bachelor of Education in Art degree from the same institution. In 1929 he assumed the position of founding director of the University of Denver’s School of Art, originally known as the Chappell School of Art. He resigned three years later when the university reneged on its agreement to grant its art courses full recognition toward a Bachelor of Arts degree. His students prevailed on him to continue teaching, resulting in the Kirkland School of Art which he opened in 1932 at 1311 Pearl Street in Denver. The building, where he painted until his death in 1981, formerly was the studio of British-born artist, Henry Read, designer of the City of Denver Seal and one of the original thirteen charter members of the Artists’ Club of Denver, forerunner of the Denver Art Museum. The Kirkland School of Art prospered for the next fourteen years with its courses accredited by the University of Colorado Extension Center in Denver. The teaching income from his art school and his painting commissions helped him survive the Great Depression. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts commissioned from him two post office murals, Cattle Roundup (1938, Eureka, Kansas), and Land Rush (1940, Sayre, Oklahoma). He also did murals for several Denver clients: the Gerald Hughes mansion (1936, later demolished), Arthur Johnson home (1936-37, Seven Drinks of Man), Albany Hotel (1937, later demolished), Neustetter’s Department Store (1937, “History of Costume,” three of five saved in 1987 before the building interior was demolished in advance of its condo conversion), and the Denver Country Club (1945, partially destroyed and later painted over). In 1953 the Ford Times, published by the Ford Motor Company, commissioned Kirkland along with fellow Denver artists, William Sanderson and Richard Sorby, to paint six watercolors each for the publication. Their work appeared in articles [about] Colorado entitled, “Take to the High Road” (of the Colorado Rockies) by Alicita and Warren Hamilton. Kirkland sketched the mountain passes and high roads in the area of Mount Evans, Independence Pass near Aspen, and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. In 1946 Kirkland closed his art school when the University of Denver rehired him as director of its School of Art and chairman of the Division of Arts and Humanities. In 1957...

Original signed watercolor painting of a ranch in the Colorado mountains in springtime or summer coloring of green, blue, yellow, white and brown by Denver artist, Irene Fowler. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 17 ½ x 23 ½ x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 12 x 18 inches. About the Artist: An important figure in the development of Denver as an artistic city, Irene Fowler was a public school teacher and founding member of the Denver Artist’s Guild (now the Colorado Artist’s Guild) in addition to being a prolific artist. She exhibited in Denver at the Schlier Gallery (where she had a solo exhibition), at the Chappell House, the University Club, and the Broadmoor Art Gallery in Colorado Springs. In 1950-1952 she served as president of the Denver Artist’s Guild. Fowler painted in oil or watercolor and her paintings were almost exclusively done en plein air. Her landscapes of Colorado...

Watercolor on paper painting by Eve (Van Ek) Drewelowe titled "The Champagne Cascades, Crescendos, Crashes" from 1945. An abstract landscape scene of a waterfall with white, yellow, and black. Presented in a custom gold frame, outer dimensions measure 43 ¾ x 33 ¾ x ½ inches. Image size is 29 ¾ x 19 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Private collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: A painter and sculptor, Eve Drewelowe was the eighth of twelve children and grew up on a farm with a tomboyish spirit. Her farm duties did not permit her to take art classes in her youth that she later felt would have hindered the development of her artistic style. Although her father died when she was eleven, he imparted to her reverence for nature and a true love of the earth, values later reflected in her western oil and watercolor landscapes. She attended the University of Iowa at Iowa City on scholarship, receiving her B.A. degree in graphic and plastic arts in 1923. After graduation and against the advice of her art professor, Charles Atherton Cumming who believed that matrimony ended a woman’s painting career, she married fellow student Jacob Van Ek. While he pursued his doctorate in political science, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Iowa for her M.A. degree in painting and the history of art. At that time her alma mater was one of the few universities in the United States offering an advanced fine arts degree, and she was its first graduate, receiving her degree in 1924. That year the Van Eks moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Jacob had obtained a position as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado. Five years later he became the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, a position he held until 1959. Eve briefly studied at the University. In 1927 and 1928 she taught part-time at the University’s School of Engineering and a decade later summer courses (1936 and 1937) in the University’s Department of Fine Arts. In 1926 she became a charter member of the Boulder Artists Guild and participated in its inaugural exhibition. Like many American artists of her generation, she helped foster an art tradition outside the established cultural centers in the East and Midwest. Her professional career spanning six decades largely was spent in and around Boulder. There she produced more than 1,000 works of art in oil, watercolor, pen and ink, and other media in styles of impressionism, regionalism, and abstraction. She devoted a considerable part of her work to Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona subject matter depicting colorful and fantastic landscapes pulsating with energy and untouched by humans. Excited by what she saw, the wide open spaces made her feel like a modern-day pioneer. In discussing her work, she once said, “What really motivated me in my youth, in my growth, in maturity was my desire to captivate everything. I put on canvas an eagerness to possess the wonder of nature and beauty of color and line – to encompass everything, not to let anything escape.” Before World War II she and her husband took two international trips that had far-reaching consequences for her career, exposing her to the arts and cultures of countries in Asia and Europe. The first in 1928-29 was an extensive excursion in the Far East for which her husband had received a scholarship to study and report on the socioeconomics of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and India. The year after their return she had her first solo show at the University of Colorado’s library gallery. Discussing the twenty-six oils and sixteen ink drawings on view representing sixteen different countries, the Christian Science Monitor reviewer noted: “The pictures have a wide range and are far from being stereotyped in subject matter, being personal in choice. The ink-brush drawings are spontaneous, well balanced, and striking in their masses, giving the sense of having been done on the spot.” Her second trip with her husband and a party from the Bureau of University Travel had a four-month itinerary that included England, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and France. It yielded seventeen oils and twenty-six ink-wash drawings which she exhibited in a February 1936 solo show at the Boulder Art Association Gallery. Her creative output in the 1930s attracted the attention of the critic for the Parisian Revue des Arts whose observations were translated and printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on June 10, 1937: To present our readers Eve Van Ek [at that time she signed her work with her married name] …is to give them an opportunity to admire a talent of multiple aspects. The eclecticism of her art passes from a rich skill in forceful oil painting of fine strokes of precision best seen perhaps in her treatment of mountain subjects, of craggy cliffs hewn as in nature, through pen and ink or lithographic crayon design, water color, and occasionally embroidery and sculpture, to the delicate perfection of detail of the miniature. The lofty mountains of Colorado have supplied her with extremely interesting subjects for study; she knows how to represent in an entirely personal way the varying scenes and the curious restlessness of the terrain. While pursuing her art, she also was a dean’s wife. The responsibilities attached to that position proved too restrictive, contributing to a grave illness. She underwent an operation in 1940 at the Mayo Clinic for a gastric polyp, a dangerous procedure at that time. Although she had expected to come back to Boulder “in a box,” the surgery proved successful. Depicting her painful hospital stay in a watercolor, Reincarnation, she reflected on the transformative experience of piecing her life back together. That October she received encouragement from the review of her solo exhibition at the Argent Gallery in New York written by Howard Devree, art critic for the New York Times who said: “The whole exhibition is stimulating…Boats, fences and even flowers in the canvases of Eve Van Ek…seem struggling endlessly to escape from the confines of the frame.” Her watercolor, Crosses, Central City (1940), illustrates her work described in the New York review. The composition pulsates with energy conveyed by the modernist technique of juxtaposing the scene’s various angles, distorting the shapes and positions of the structures, additionally highlighting them with bright colors. The telephone poles at various angles represent crosses figuratively marking a Way of the Cross symbolized by the wooden stairs...

20th century modernist watercolor painting depicting an old mine and houses in Cortez, Colorado by Richard K. Ayers with colors of blue, green, gold, and brown. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 36 ½ x 30 ½ x ¾ inches. Image size is 24 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition. About the Artist: Richard K. Ayers (1921-2003) studied art at Miami University...

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...

Signed and dated lower right: J.F. Cropsey 1887

Signed and dated lower right: • FARNY • /88

Beautiful Hudson River School Original gouache autumnal landscape of vivid sunset through forest by Charles Russell Loomis (American 1857 - 1936), circa 1880. Warm and cool tones wit...

Signed lower left, titled and dated Born in Staindrop, County Durham, England, he was a portrait and landscape painter, especially appreciated for watercolor painting, which he sold...

David Johnson was born in 1827 in New York City. Beginning in 1845, he studied for two years in the antique school of the National Academy of Design. His classmates and colleagues in...

Régis Francois Gignoux was a distinguished nineteenth-century artist whose work illuminated the sublime aspects of the American landscape. He was born in Lyon, France and trained at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his instructor, the history painter Paul-Hipployte Delaroche, encouraged his interest in landscape painting. He traveled to the United States in 1840, and immediately showed interest in American Landscapes. He immediately settled in New York and painted many well known sites of the United States: Niagara Falls, the Catskill Mountains, Mount Washington, and Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. He is most famous for his winter scenes, but shows beautiful landscapes year round. Gignoux quickly established himself within the leading Hudson River School circles of the time. He took sketching trips with Frederic Church and John Frederick Kensett. Today, his paintings are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, and the Georgia Museum of Art. This beautiful piece comes from the estate of the artist in New Jersey, and Meyer Fine Art...