John Dolph

River Landscape

Signed lower right. An itinerant portrait, miniature, and landscape painter, Ambrose Andrews had a wide-ranging career geographically that saw him in many regions including New York (1829-31), Connecticut (1837), Texas (1837-1841) and Louisiana (1841-42). After 1844, he was active in St. Louis, New York City, Buffalo, New York, Vermont and Canada. He was born in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and in 1824, attended the National Academy of Design. Andrews exhibited paintings at the Republic of Texas Capitol...

Signed and dated 1877. Mortimer Smith, a lesser-known yet skilled artist of the Hudson River School, captured the untamed beauty of the American landscape with remarkable depth. This painting presents a seacoast scene with a solitary fisherman, with his boat during the tide. The rugged cliffs frame the composition, their weathered surfaces telling the story of time and nature’s relentless forces. Sunlight filters through the mist, casting a halo glow in the sky, while waves crash against the shore in rhythmic motion. Smith’s brushwork conveys both the serenity and power of the natural world, inviting the viewer to step into the scene under nature's power and beauty. Although born in Jamestown, New York, Mortimer Smith would become well-known as a Detroit architect and artist by the end of the nineteenth century. Little is known of Smith's earlier years; however, scholars speculate that he studied in Oberlin and Sandusky, Ohio before moving to Detroit in 1855. There, the artist flourished and became famous for his crisp landscapes of local scenery, including his beloved winter scenes. In addition to his artistic career, Smith founded a successful architectural firm by the name of Smith, Hynchman and Grylls; Smith's reputation in the visual arts was often overshadowed by his draftsmanship as an architect. Nevertheless, he was a vital force in Detroit's arts community exhibiting his works in venues including the Detroit Art...

A fine New Hampshire landscape by American artist Frederick Dickinson Williams (1829–1915). Frederick Dickinson Williams was born into a patrician household in Boston, Massachusetts and attended the prestigious Boston Latin School before entering Harvard University in 1846. After graduation and until 1874, Williams taught drawing and painting in the Boston Public School System as a Professor of Drawing until 1874. Williams and his wife, the former Lucia M. Hunt, of Newburyport, relocated to Paris, France, where both studied the new French art and painted landscapes and genre scenes in their studio until 1888, when Lucia died in Paris. Williams returned to the United States and settled in Boston, opening a studio in late 1888. He continued to paint in the Boston area with regular trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and other wilderness areas where he produced a large body of French-inspired landscapes in the manner of Corot and other contemporary French painters. In 1904, a serious fire in his Boston studio destroyed all of his inventory, including a number of award-winning canvases from his Paris sojourn. Despite this significant loss, he continued to paint. During his long and successful career, Williams exhibited his work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Washington DC Art...

George Inness (1825 - 1894) A Cloudy Day, 1886 Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Signed and dated lower center Provenance: The artist Estate of the above Fifth Avenue Galleries, New York, Executor's Sale of Paintings by the Late George Inness, N.A., February 12 - 14, 1895, Lot 132 Joseph H. Spafford, acquired from the above Mrs. Spafford, by bequest from the above Leroy Ireland, New York, 1951 Ernest Closuit, Fort Worth, Texas Meredith Long & Company, Houston, Texas, circa 1960 Private Collection Shannon's Fine Art, American and European Fine Art Auction, October 27, 2016, Lot 42 Exhibited: New York, American Fine Arts Society, Exhibition of the Paintings Left by the Late George Inness, December 27, 1894, no. 90.  Literature: LeRoy Ireland, The Works of George Inness: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonne, Austin, Texas, 1965, p. 336, no. 1324, illustrated. Michael Quick, "George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonne," Vol. II, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2007, pp. 282-83, 311, no. 966, illustrated.  George Inness, one of America's foremost landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, was born in 1825 near Newburgh, New York. He spent most of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. He was apprenticed to an engraving firm until 1843, when he studied art in New York with Regis Gignoux, a landscape painter from whom he learned the classical styles and techniques of the Old Masters. In 1851, sponsored by a patron, Inness made a fifteen-month trip to Italy. In 1853 he traveled to France, where he discovered Barbizon landscape painting, leading him to adopt a style that used looser, sketchier brushwork and more open compositions, emphasizing the expressive qualities of nature. After working in New York from 1854 to 1859, he moved to Medfield, Massachusetts, and four years later to New Jersey, where through a fellow painter he began to experiment with using glazes that would allow him to fill his compositions with subtle effects of light. Duncan Phillips remarked on Inness’s mellow light as a unifying force, saying, “…he was equipped to modernize the grand manner of Claude and to apply the methods of Barbizon to American subjects." At this time also, Inness developed an interest in the religious theories of Emanuel Swedenborg...