Herbert Theurillat

Still life with pears

1944

Work on canvas Molded frame in plaster and gilded wood 35.5 x 41.5 x 7 cm

Illegible signature Work on canvas

Georgina Klitgaard Apples and Pears Still Life Signed lower right Oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches Georgina Klitgaard’s art has sometimes gotten lost in the critical propensity to assign artists to membership in one school or another. Unfortunately for her posthumous reputation, Klitgaard defied easy characterization. She was a U.S. modernist, working in both oil and watercolors, but never abandoned figurative painting. She made her reputation in landscape but also excelled in portraits, flower studies, and even cityscapes. Yet despite Klitgaard’s ambiguous status in art history, her paintings continue to fascinate viewers attracted to the unsteady ground between twentieth-century realism and expressionism. Georgina Klitgaard (née Berrian) was born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York (now part of the Bronx); the Berrians had lived in the area since at least the U.S. Revolution. After graduating from Barnard College, she studied art at the National Academy of Design. In 1919 she married Kay Klitgaard, a Danish artist and writer. The next year, her life took a decisive turn when the couple visited friends in Woodstock, NY—about 120 miles north of New York City--and fell in love with the area. In 1906, L. Birge Harrison helped found the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock and the area became a magnet for landscape painters. The Klitgaards bought a house in 1922 on a steep ledge at the end of Cricket Ridge, high above Bearsville, which provided panoramic vistas overlooking the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. Klitgaard joined the artists’ colony in the area, which at the time included artists Ernest Fiene and Katherine Schmidt. Klitgaard exhibited widely and her career slowly developed momentum. She was a regular contributor at Whitney Museum shows from 1927 to 1944. In 1929, she exhibited a painting entitled “Carousel” in the Whitney Studio Club’s famous exhibition “Circus in Paint.” Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney acquired five paintings by Klitgaard in the early 1930s and served as a significant patron for the artist. Klitgaard s New York dealer, Frank Rehn...

"Four Pears" by Mark Bradley Schwartz is an original oil on canvas depicting a still life with four pears and a white vase with flowers. A native of Illinois, He began his professional life as a graphic designer and art director in St. Louis, Missouri and later moved to Southern California to further his design career. Although Schwartz’s career was successful, he wanted to pursue work of a more personally fulfilling nature. To reach these new goals Schwartz first attended life drawing classes at Associates in Art, in Sherman Oaks, California. He later studied at the California Art Institute in Westlake Village, California, where he received extensive training in drawing and painting the human figure from life. While studying with famed illustrator Glen Orbik...