Worthington Whittredge

The High Road

Signed and dated lower left: J. F. Cropsey / 1885

Afternoon In The Hudson River Valley, 1854 By. John William Hill (English, American, 1812-1879) Signed and Dated Lower Left Unframed: 20 x 30 inches Fra...

Signed lower right: F.A. SILVA.

Autumn Idle, Catskills, New York, October 23, 1885 By. Jervis McEntee (American, 1828-1891) Unframed: 11.5" x 16" Framed: 20.5" x 25" Jervis McEntee was a landscape painter, born in 1828 in the Hudson River Valley in Rondout, New York. It was said that 'Nostalgia may well have been McEntee's middle name", and that he, always attempting to stir emotions in his viewers, often attached poetry to his paintings when exhibiting them. At a time when the Civil War and its after effects caused great disruption in America, McEntee's work may have provided a visual escape for the more educated. His works are rich with the colors of autumn and winter, and he, who often painted in the Catskill Mountains, preferred smaller views rather than panoramas. Usually detailed and simple, his works often reflect a sense of loneliness. As a youngster, McEntee would play in his parents attic, pretending it was an art studio. An unsuccessful attempt at business led McEntee back into the art profession where he studied in New York City under the influence of Frederic E. Church, master of the Hudson River Style, and soon had a showing of his own in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building by 1855. In about 1858, Mr. and Mrs. McEntee hired English architect Calvert Vaux to build a studio next to McEntee's fathers house in Rondout. There Jervis would spend most of his summers, painting the nearby Catskill Mountains, and returning to the city during the winter. At the outbreak of the Civil War, McEntee enlisted in the Union...

Monogrammed and dated lower right: DJ 72; on verso: Buck Mountain. / Lake George. / David Johnson, 1872.

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...