Samuel Lancaster Gerry

Ladies Hiking in the White Mountains by Samuel Lancaster Gerry (1813-1891)

19th Century

"New England Sunrise," 1910 by Hudson River School painter Lockwood DeForest (American, 1850-1932) is oil on artists card-stock and measures 9.75 x 14 inches. The work is signed by DeForest and dated Sept. 17, 1910 at lower left. The work is framed in an elegant, period appropriate frame, and ready to hang. Lockwood de Forest was born in New York in 1850 to a prominent family. He grew up in Greenwich Village and on Long Island at the family summer estate in Cold Spring Harbor. As was customary for a cultivated family in the Gilded Age, the de Forests made frequent trips abroad. Excursions to the great museums, which were prominent on the de Forests agenda, deepened the young Lockwood's familiarity with European painting and sculpture. Though he had begun drawing and painting somewhat earlier, it was during a visit to Rome in 1868 that nineteen-year-old de Forest first began to study art seriously, taking painting lessons from the Italian landscapist Hermann David Salomon Corrodi (1844–1905). More importantly, on the same trip, Lockwood met one of America’s most celebrated painters, (and his maternal great- uncle by marriage) Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), who quickly became his mentor. DeForest accompanied Church on sketching trips around Italy and continued this practice when they both returned to America in 1869. Early on in his career, de Forest made a habit of recording the date and often the place of his oil sketches, as to create a visual diary of his travels. Lockwood’s profession as a landscape painter can be primarily attributed to Frederic E. Church and his belief in the young artist’s talent. De Forest often visited Church in the Hudson River community of Catskill where, in addition to sketching trips and afternoons of painting, he assisted with the architectural drawings and planning of Olana. In 1872, de Forest took a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. During these formative years de Forest counted among his friend’s artists such as Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80), George Henry Yewell (1830–1923), John Frederick Kensett (1816–72), Jervis McEntee (1828–91), and Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932). Over the next decade de Forest experienced success as a painter. He exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design in 1872, and made two more painting trips abroad, in 1875–76 and 1877–78, traveling to the major continental capitals but also the Middle East and North Africa. His trip to the Middle East and the library at Church’s home, Olana, established his interest in design during his mid-twenties. From about 1878 to 1902, landscape painting was overshadowed by his activities and preoccupation with East Indian architecture and décor, a style that became quite fashionable in late nineteenth century America. From 1879-1883, de Forest founded Associated Artists along with Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler...

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...