Ernest Fiene

"Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts, " Ernest Fiene, WPA, Boat on Beach

Gerrit Beneker (1882 - 1934) Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, New England, 1926 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches Signed, titled, and dated lower left Provenance: Louis H. Barnett, Fort Worth, Texas In 1905, Gerrit Beneker began his art career as an illustrator. He married Flora Judd, his high school sweetheart from Grand Rapids and they moved to Brooklyn, NY. Gerrit's early passion was to create an art that would inspire and provide honor to the workingman. As such, he had no interest in painting portraits of pretty women, which were so often seen on the magazine covers of the day. Rather he wanted to seek out workingmen on the bridges, tunnels and skyscrapers of NYC, and paint them in their environments. He completed over 150 magazine covers, numerous ads including many for Ivory Soap...

Georgina Klitgaard (1893 - 1976) Buttermilk Bay, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1933 Oil on canvas 18 x 30 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York Harold Ordway Rugg Private Collection, Western New York Georgina Berrian was born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York in 1893. She was educated at Barnard College...

Harry Leith-Ross (1886 - 1973) Fisherman of Yankee Cove Oil on canvasboard 8 1/8 x 10 1/2 inches Signed lower left; also with artist, title, and number '39' on label verso Provenance: Private Collection, Pennsylvania Landscape painter Harry Leith-Ross was born in Mauritius in 1886, a British possession in the Indian Ocean. He came to America as a seventeen year old. Before beginning, some ten years later in 1914, his studies at the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, New York at the relatively late age of twenty-eight, Leith-Ross had worked as a commercial artist. He studied with John F. Carlson and Birge Harrison at the League Summer School, and later with C. Y. Turner at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He then went to Paris, studying with Jean Paul Laurens at the Academie Julien and in England with Stanhope Forbes. Long associated with the Bucks County artists' colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Leith-Ross may have first gone there in 1912. It is definitely known that he visited the area in 1916 at the invitation of a student he had met when both attended the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, John Fulton Folinsbee. Birge Harrison, his former instructor at the League, whom he met again, was also there in New Hope during the winters from 1914 to 1916. The third and last generation of the New Hope colony would be comprised of artists like Leith-Ross, Folinsbee and Kenneth R. Nunamaker. It is somewhat ironic that Leith-Ross, so long affiliated with the New Hope School of American Impressionism...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943 Watercolor on paper Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

Titled on verso panel Signed lower left corner Measures Painting 17 x 22 inches Framed 21.125 x 26.75 inches William H. Kinnicutt (1865–1934) was an American artist known for his ...

A charming & diminutive 1930s oil on Masonite view of Martha's Vineyard harbor by notable Chicago artist Francis Chapin. Artwork size: 8 3/4" x 11 3/4". Framed size: 12 1/2" x 15 1/2". Provenance: Estate of the artist. Francis Chapin, affectionately called the “Dean of Chicago Painters” by his colleagues, was one of the city’s most popular and celebrated painters in his day. Born at the dawn of the 20th Century in Bristolville, Ohio, Chapin graduated from Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. He would set down deep roots at the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibiting there over 31 times between 1926 and 1951. In 1927 Chapin won the prestigious Bryan Lathrop Fellowship from the Art Institute – a prize that funded the artist’s yearlong study trip to Europe. Upon his return to the United States, Chapin decided to remain in Chicago, noting the freedom Chicago artists have in developing independently of the pressure to conform to pre-existing molds (as was experienced by artists in New York, for example). Chapin became a popular instructor at the Art Institute, teaching there from 1929 to 1947 and at the Art Institute’s summer art school in Saugatuck, Michigan (now called Oxbow) between 1934 – 1938 (he was the director of the school from 1941-1945). A prolific painter, Chapin produced numerous works while traveling in Mexico, France, Spain, Saugatuck and Martha’s Vineyard, where he frequently spent summers and taught at the Old Sculpin Gallery there. Chapin was best recognized for his dynamic and vibrant images of Chicago during the 1930s and 40s. Chapin was a resident of the Old Town neighborhood where he lived and kept his studio on Menomonee Street for many years. Described as a “colorful figure, nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall, and thin, and usually wearing tweeds”, it is easy to imagine Chapin at work observing the busy street life of the city. In addition to his many exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chapin’s work was shown during his lifetime at such institutions as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, among others. Francis Chapin’s paintings are represented in the collections the Art Institute of Chicago; the Friedman Collection, Chicago; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown; the Denver Art Museum; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach...

Mystery American Artist No. 9 Glouchester, c. Early 20th Century Oil on artist board 16 x 20 in. Framed: 20 x 24 x 1 1/2 in. Signed lower left Inscribed verso: Dolitsky / No 9 Glouch...

A Vibrant, Colorful 1950s Mid-Century Modern Harbor Scene of Martha's Vineyard by Notable Chicago Artist, Francis Chapin (Am. 1899-1965). Completed during the summer months in the 1...