Leon Kroll

Revolutionary Guard House for General Putnam's Army, West Redding, Connecticut

1911

Alexander Bower (1875 - 1952) Portland Harbor, Maine, 1910 Oil on canvas 27 x 33 inches Signed and dated lower right An American Impressionist, Alexande Bower was born in New York, studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and was living with his wife in Cliff Island, Maine by 1914. Despite his urban upbringing, the coast and the sea fascinated Bower. A large portion of his paintings are seascapes, particularly scenes depicting the coast of Cape Elizabeth...

Howard Everett Giles (1876 - 1955) MacMahan's Maine Oil on canvas backed with board 30 x 30 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Art Institute of Chicago Christie's New York, December 8, 2011, Lot 2 Howard Giles spent most of his career in New York City, where he was an educator, magazine illustrator, and painter who espoused the theory of Dynamic Symmetry. He was born in Brooklyn, and as a young man worked in a New York railroad office. Financial support of a family friend allowed him to study at the Art Students League with H. Siddons Mowbray. In early 1910, he became an illustrator for Scribner's Magazine, and in 1912, on sketching assignment for Scribner's went to England. During World War I, he did illustration for Harper's Monthly Magazine, and many of his images were 'roaring twenties' genre and figure paintings. In 1912, he began teaching life classes at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (later Parsons School of Design), and remained there until the late 1920s. During that time, he was also a part-time instructor at the Childs-Walker School in Boston, and accepted numerous invitations to lecture including at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Arts and Wellesley College. His initial painting style was Impressionism, but he grew increasingly interested in other scientific, aesthetic theories. He worked with Jay Hambridge from 1916 to 1919, applying Hambridge's theory of Dynamic Symmetry to his painting and his lecture topics. From 1922 to 1926, Giles also worked with and was influenced in his own painting by colorist theorist Denman Ross, who espoused a limited and related color palette. For many of his paintings, Giles used watercolor although he also painted in oil and pastels. During the last years before his retirement when he moved to Woodstock...