Frank Penfold

Frank Penfold, Forest Interior Painted in France, fully signed and dated 1889

Jean Richard Goubie French, 1842-1899 A Travers Bois Oil on canvas 25 ½ by 39 ¾ in. W/frame 30 ½ by 45 in. Circa 1892 Jean Richard Goubie was bo...

Oil on canvas Charlotte Buell Coman was a prominent late 19th, early 20th-century landscape artist known for her Tonalist paintings, especially with misty blue coloration. She was a key painter in bringing the Barbizon tradition from France to America. This style and method emanated from a group of painters, led by Jean Corot and Charles Daubigny, who frequented the French village of Barbizon and did plein-air painting in realist style of bucolic subjects such as shepherd girls herding their flocks. It was a revolutionary departure from studio painting and from prescribed academic subjects. Coman was born in Waterville, New York to a family that ran a tannery and shoe factory. She married early and moved to the frontier town of Iowa City, Iowa where she became a pioneer housewife. However, her life became complicated because her husband died several years after their marriage, and she became deaf, something she jokingly said later was an advantage because she couldn’t hear the scathing remarks of critics. She returned to Waterville and determined that in spite of her trouble, she was not going to be idle. At age forty, she committed herself to a career in art. Her first teacher was James Brevoort, a landscape painter of New York City, and she continued for another ten years abroad, first in Paris where she exhibited at the Paris Salon and studied with Harry Thompson and Emile Vernier...