Steve Cryan

Awaiting the Call...

This watercolor is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Circus Wagons, 1927, watercolor on paper, signed and dated lower left, 10 x19 ¾ inches (sight), provenance includes Stary-Sheets Art Gallery (Gualala, CA); J. Ralph & Louis Stone Foundation; presented in a newer metal frame behind glazing About the Painting Millard Sheets was only twenty years old and in his third year of studies at the Chouinard Art Institute when he painted Circus Wagons. Despite his youth, Sheets was already an accomplished artist who had publicly exhibited his work and won prestigious prizes. Within several years, he would have his first solo exhibition at one of Los Angeles’ premiere galleries and become a painting instructor at his alma mater. In Circus Wagons we already see Sheets deft handling of the watercolor medium and his interest in the California Scene. In this case, Sheets captures a back lot view of a traveling circus, a subject he sometimes returned to, including in a color screen print in the collection of the National Gallery. Sheets made a career by painting what he knew and observed firsthand. This approach allowed Sheets to capture with authenticity the details of each narrative. Even with a narrowly limited palette and an economy of brushstrokes, Sheets effectively depicts the southern California scene with its strong and mysterious shadows, as well as the workers and circus animals. Seen through the hindsight of his six-decade long career, Circus Wagons offers a fascinating insight into the early development of California Scene painting which would by the mid-1930s become the best recognized style on the West Coast. About the Artist Millard Sheets was the dean of California watercolorists. His list of accomplishments is so extensive that his entry in Who was Who in American Art is over forty lines. Born in Pomona, California, Sheets became a painter at an early age, winning a prize at the Los Angeles County Fair in 1918. By the mid to late-1920s, Sheets became a regular at art exhibitions in the western part of the United States, winning several additional prizes before he reached the age of twenty-five. Sheets studied at the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute from 1925 through 1929 with Frank Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle and had his first solo show with Los Angeles’ Dalzell Hatfield Gallery in 1929. During the 1930s, Sheets was invited to exhibit at almost every major American Museum and in many ways, his work came to represent the California watercolor school...

Noble nautical scene of a small rowboat coming to shore from a larger sailing vessel by George A. Robbins (American, 1918-2010). In the foreground, sever...

Carl Frederick Gaertner (American, 1898-1952) Flower Garden, Cape Cod, c. 1940s Gouache on illustration board 17.5 x 29 inches 27 x 39 inches, as framed Carl Gaertner was one of the greatest painters to emerge from the Cleveland School...

George Howell Gay (American, 1858-1931) Untitled Seascape, c. late 19th-early 20th century Watercolor on board 12 x 17 3/4 in. Framed: 16 1/4 x 22 1/4 in. Signed lower right: Geo Howell Gay George H. Gay was well known for his watercolor landscapes, seascapes and paintings of rivers and ships, mostly along the shores of New England. Gay also painted snowscapes, but these are scarcer. It is unusual to find an oil painting by this artist, as he worked mainly in watercolor. Some of his works display a tonalist aesthetic. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 2, 1858, and lived in Chicago and then in 1889, settled in Bronxville, New York. Gay was a pupil of Paul Brown and Henry Elkins in Chicago. He is known to have exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1890; Boston Art...