Terry Elkins

Terry Elkins, "Strong's Barn" landscape with barn watercolor on paper

2018

Antique American watercolor painting, landscape harvest farm scene by Frank F. English (1854 - 1922), Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Circa 1900. A very attractive painting by the celebrated Pennsylvania artist Frank F. English, the location is in Point Pleasant, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The painting depicts a scene of blue skies with two farmers tossing hay with pitchforks & two horses harnessed to a hay wagon, with barns to the background. The painting signed lower right " Frank F. English", condition is excellent this very charming painting is ready to hang on your wall. Biography Frank F. English was born in Louisville Kentucky in 1854. In the early 1880s, he studied for five years in the evening classes of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His instructors included Thomas Eakins, James P. Kelly and Thomas Anshutz. However, English's reputation primarily rests with his outstanding facility as a watercolorist; most of his known paintings are executed in this medium. English's propensity for its use coincides, appropriately enough, with the watercolor's growing popularity among other American painters. The American Water Color Society brought the medium special prominence by the late 1860s, and acceptance on the level of oil painting in 1876. That same year, the society was invited to display its works at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Its members exhibited 116 watercolors, and their public exposure was enormous. It is safe to assume that during the 159-day Centennial, Frank English was among the nearly 10 million exposition attendees, surpassing attendance records at all preceding world's fairs. At age twenty-two, English, traveled to Philadelphia to see works by the Society's notables such as Samuel Colman, R. Swain Gifford, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Albert Fitch...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943 Watercolor on paper Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...