Gordon Cope

'Bay Shanties, San Francisco', Marin, WPA, Mid-century California oil, Benezit

1950

Incised lower right, 'Gavin' for Boyd Gavin (American, 20th century) and dated 1986; additionally titled, verso, on old exhibition label, 'Painted Trunks...

Signed lower right, 'L. Curtis' for Lynn Curtis (American, 20th century) and painted circa 1985. Exhibited: Lodi Art Center, 11th Annual Art Exhibition (from accompanying label). Framed dimensions: 38.25 H x 60.5 W x 1.75 D Inches. A very substantial, oil and mixed media Modernist work showing a profusion of spring wild-flowers bursting through panels of wind-billowed canvas. A dynamic expression of spring's power of growth overcoming all physical restraint. Lynn Curtis holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Dartmouth College and a Masters in painting and drawing from The University of Iowa. She received a postgraduate certificate in printmaking from London's Slade School...

Signed verso, 'Keith Longcor', dated 1989 and titled, 'Diamond Auto Electric'. A kinetic, post-industrial landscape showing a view of various automobiles parked on a garage forecour...

Initialed lower right, 'K.W.' for Katherine Westphal (American, 1919-2018) and painted circa 1965; additionally bearing label, verso, inscribed with artist's name and titled 'Venice'. Framed Dimensions: 33.25 x 2 x 29 Inches A large, Post-Impressionist oil showing a view of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute on the Punte della Dogana with half-a-dozen gondolas rocking on the gentle swell of the Guidecca. A vibrant modernist vedute by this well-listed California woman artist who shows the iconic Baroque church as if suspended in golden light, both reflecting the sunset and, itself, reflected in the shimmering waters. Born in Los Angeles, Katherine Westphal first attended Los Angeles City College and, subsequently, the University of California at Berkeley where she studied painting and art history and received both her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees. In 1943, she was awarded the Phelan Travelling Scholarship which funded her travel to Mexico where she visited the studios of both David Siquieros and Diego Rivera, an experience that confirmed her lifelong preference for Modernist principles in her work. Over the course of a long and multi-faceted career, Westphal exhibited widely and with success and was the recipient of numerous prizes, medals and juried awards. In addition to her career as a fine artist, Westphal wrote extensively on art theory and also became a beloved teacher at the University of California, Davis, becoming a tenured faculty member in 1968, a full professor in 1975. She retired in 1979 as Professor Emeritus. Katherine Westphal’s work is held in the permanent collections of prominent American museums including the Smithsonian Museum...

Signed lower right, 'Walles' for Luc Cossier Walles (French, born 1946), titled lower right, 'Paris' and dated 1978. Luc Cossier, known as Walles, was born in Poland to French paren...

Signed lower left, 'Unik' for Leonid Unik (Ukrainian-Hungarian, born 1951) and inscribed, verso, on stretcher bar, with signature and title, 'Hongre' (Hungary). Leonid Unik first st...

Signed Lower Right John Bradley Storrs (1885 - 1956) Born and raised in Chicago, John Storrs was a pioneer modernist sculptor known for his precisely executed, solid, non-objectiv...

It is infrequent, to say the least, that a diagnosis of tuberculosis proves fortuitous, but that was the event, in 1921, that set Paul Starrett Sample on the road to becoming a professional artist. (The best source for an overview of Sample’s life and oeuvre remains Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene, exhib. cat., [Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, 1988] with a detailed and definitive chronology by Sample scholar, Paula F. Glick, and an essay by Robert L. McGrath. It is the source for this essay unless otherwise indicated.) Sample, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896 to a construction engineer and his wife, spent his childhood moving with his family to the various locations that his father’s work took them. By 1911, the family had landed in Glencoe, Illinois, settling long enough for Paul to graduate from New Trier High School in 1916. Sample enrolled at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where his interests were anything but academic. His enthusiasms included the football and basketball teams, boxing, pledging at a fraternity, and learning to play the saxophone. After the United States entered World War I, Sample, to his family’s dismay, signed on for the Naval Reserve, leading directly to a hiatus from Dartmouth. In 1918 and 1919, Sample served in the U.S. Merchant Marine where he earned a third mate’s license and seriously contemplated life as a sailor. Acceding to parental pressure, he returned to Dartmouth, graduating in 1921. Sample’s undergraduate life revolved around sports and a jazz band he formed with his brother, Donald, two years younger and also a Dartmouth student. In November 1933, Sample summarized his life in a letter he wrote introducing himself to Frederick Newlin Price, founder of Ferargil Galleries, who would become his New York art dealer. The artist characterized his undergraduate years as spent “wasting my time intensively.” He told Price that that “I took an art appreciation course and slept thru it every day” (Ferargil Galleries Records, circa 1900–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available on line). In 1920, Donald Sample contracted tuberculosis. He went for treatment to the world-famous Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for the prescribed regimen of rest, healthful food, and fresh air. Visiting his brother in 1921, Paul also contracted the disease. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, and had no certain cure before the development of streptomycin in 1946. Even for patients who appeared to have recovered, there was a significant rate of recurrence. Thus, in his letter to Price, Sample avoided the stigma conjured by naming the disease, but wrote “I had a relapse with a bad lung and spent the next four years hospitalized in Saranac Lake.” The stringent physical restrictions imposed by adherence to “the cure” required Sample to cultivate an alternate set of interests. He read voraciously and, at the suggestion of his physician, contacted the husband of a fellow patient for instruction in art. That artist, then living in Saranac, was Jonas Lie (1880–1940), a prominent Norwegian-American painter and an associate academician at the National Academy of Design. Lie had gained renown for his dramatic 1913 series of paintings documenting the construction of the Panama Canal (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; United States Military Academy, West Point, New York). Primarily a landscape artist, Lie had a particular affinity for scenes with water. His paintings, impressionistic, atmospheric, and brushy, never strayed from a realistic rendering of his subject. Sample regarded Lie as a mentor and retained a lifelong reverence for his teacher. Sample’s early paintings very much reflect Lie’s influence. ` In 1925, “cured,” Sample left Saranac Lake for what proved to be a brief stay in New York City, where his veteran’s benefits financed a commercial art course. The family, however, had moved to California, in the futile hope that the climate would benefit Donald. Sample joined them and after Donald’s death, remained in California, taking classes at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In Sample’s account to Price, “I couldn’t stomach the practice of painting a lot of High Sierras and desert flowers which seemed to be the only kind of pictures that were sold here so I got a job teaching drawing and painting at the art school of the University of Southern California.” Initially hired as a part-time instructor, Sample progressed to full-time status and ultimately, by the mid-1930s, to the post of Chairman of the Fine Art Department. Sample, however, did not want to wind up as a professor. “Teaching is all right in small doses,” he wrote, “but I have a horror of drifting into being a college professor and nothing more.” At the same time as he taught, Sample began to exhibit his work in a variety of venues at first locally, then nationally. Though he confessed himself “a terrible salesman,” and though occupied with continued learning and teaching, Sample was nonetheless, ambitious. In 1927, he wrote in his diary, “I am eventually going to be a painter and a damned good one. And what is more, I am going to make money at it” (as quoted by Glick, p. 15). In 1928, Sample felt sufficiently solvent to marry his long-time love, Sylvia Howland, who had also been a patient at Saranac Lake. The Howland family were rooted New Englanders and in summertime the Samples regularly traveled East for family reunion vacations. While the 1930s brought serious hardship to many artists, for Paul Sample it was a decade of success. Buttressed by the financial safety net of his teacher’s salary, he painted realist depictions of the American scene. While his work addressed depression-era conditions with a sympathetic eye, Sample avoided the anger and tinge of bitterness that characterized much contemporary realist art. Beginning in 1930, Sample began to exhibit regularly in juried exhibitions at important national venues, garnering prizes along the way. In 1930, Inner Harbor won an honorable mention in the Annual Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year Sample was also represented in a show at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and at the Biennial Exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1931, Dairy Ranch won the second Hallgarten Prize at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York. Sample also made his first appearances at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1936, Miner’s Resting won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Always interested in watercolor, in 1936, Sample began to send works on paper to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York. While participating in juried exhibitions, Sample also cultivated commercial possibilities. His first New York art dealer was the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York, which included his work in a November 1931 exhibition. In 1934, Sample joined the Ferargil Galleries in New York, after Fred Price arranged the sale of Sample’s Church Supper to the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1937, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Sample’s Janitor’s Holiday from the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, a notable honor. As prestigious as this exhibition schedule may have been, by far Sample’s most visible presence in the 1930s and 1940s was the result of his relationship with Henry Luce’s burgeoning publishing empire, Time, Inc. Sample’s first contribution to a Luce publication appears to have been another San Pedro...

Oil on board Image size: 12 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches (31.75 x 40 cm) Contemporary style handmade frame Exhibitions 1952 Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition, Gallery no. VII, no.429. This forest scene invites the viewer into a multi-sensory event where the cool, damp shadows of the foliage can almost be felt and the rich bouquet of the forest floor recalled. Here, Sherlock has chosen a somewhat unusual angle and composition, dissecting each truck and tree form so that only a part can be seen. Furthermore, as we look into the depths of this space it becomes clear that we are stood gazing down into a valley that is in the distance, behind this wooded area. Indeed, instead of giving us an uninterrupted view of this vista, as perhaps would be expected, this view is deliberately blocked and our focus is directed instead towards the organic forms in the foreground. The Artist  Marjorie Sherlock was born at Fir Tree Cottage, George Lane, Wanstead, Essex, on 3 February 1891, the elder child of the civil engineer, Henry Sherlock, and his wife, Alice (née Platts), who was born in Benares, India. By 1901, the family was living at ‘The Limes’, 121 Mill Road, Cambridge, and Marjorie received an education locally. In 1918, she entered into marriage with her cousin, Major Wilfrid Barrett, though this proved unsuccessful and they later divorced (he remarrying in 1941). She then continued to live at the family home until the Second World War. During the First World War, Marjorie Sherlock studied at Westminster Technical Institute under the Camden Town School painters, Walter Sickert and Harold Gilman. She exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1917, when she showed a powerful view of the interior of Liverpool Street Station (Government Art Collection) (to which the current etching [202] relates). In time, she would exhibit at the International Society, the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Society of 207 Graphic Art and the Women’s International Art Club (becoming a member of the last two). She also showed work internationally. Developing as a printmaker as well as a painter, Sherlock studied etching under Malcolm Osborne at the Royal College of Art in 1925. She published her etchings in four series, the titles of which indicate her love of travel: ‘English Etchings, ‘Egyptian Etchings’ (both 1925), ‘German Etchings’ (1929) and ‘Indian Etchings’ (1932). During this period, she also visited the united States. More admiring of Continental painters than British ones, she furthered her studies, in 1938, by working in Paris under André L’Hôte and André Dunoyer de Segonzac. During the Second World War, Sherlock moved to East Devon and settled at Oxenways, a Victorian hunting lodge...

Till the Clouds Roll By 1945 Frank Sinatra Mid Century Modern Hollywood Film WPA TILL THE COULDS ROLL BY (Film Set), oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches signed “Richard Whorf” lower right and signed and dated on the verso “R. Whorf/ Dec. 21, 1945. Frame by Hendenryk. ABOUT THE PAINTING This painting is from the collection of Barbara and Frank Sinatra, dated December 21, 1945 (just nine days after Frank Sinatra’s 30th birthday), and depicts the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Culver City backlot during the filming of Till the Clouds Roll By, the direction of the film having been taking over by Richard Whorf in December 1945. It is not presently clear if Whorf gave the Sinatras this painting as a gift, as the presence of the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries label on the verso indicates the painting may have been sourced there. Frank and Nancy Sinatra acquired a number of works from Dalzell Hatfield Galleries during the 1940’s, or perhaps they framed it for the couple. Sinatra performed “Old Man River’ in the film. Sinatra and June Allyson are depicted in the center of the painting. PROVENANCE From the Estate of Mrs. Nancy Sinatra; Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. An image of the Dalzell Hatfield label and the back of the original frame (which we replaced with a stunning Heydenrk frame) are attached. Nancy Sinatra was Fran's first wife. Nancy Rose Barbato was 17 years old when she met Frank Sinatra, an 18-year-old singer from Hoboken, on the Jersey Shore in the summer of 1934. They married in 1939 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City where Frank gave Nancy a recording of a song dedicated to her titled "Our Love" as a wedding present. The young newlyweds lived and worked in New Jersey, where Frank worked as an unknown singing waiter and master of ceremonies at the Rustic Cabin while Nancy worked as a secretary at the American Type Founders. His musical career took off after singing with big band leaders Harry James and Tommy Dorsey...

Filippo De Pisis, Sanremo, 1938, Oil on Canvas, 35.5 x 27 cm. Signed lower right.

Signed (at lower left): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ