Ashcan School Paintings

Oil paint on card stock backed onto masonite by the well known Provincetown artist, Elliot Orr. Signed lower left and dated 1934. Condition is very good. Most likely a Provincetown...

Up for sale is a Finely painted American Ashcan School painting of a NYC Symphony by John Newton Howitt (1885 - 1958). Most likely painted in the 1920’s Painting is really a gem in...

Eugene Lawrence Vail (1857 - 1934) St. Moritz, A Sunny Corner, circa 1925 Oil on canvas 21 1/4 x 25 1/2 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Berry-Hill Galleries, New York Eugene Vail (Saint-Servan, France September 29, 1857 - Paris, December 28, 1934), the son of a French mother and an American father, Lawrence Eugene Vail, studied at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey (where Alfred Stieglitz was born in 1864) and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1877. Then he became a student of William Merritt Chase and J. Carroll Beckwith at the Art Students League before returning to France. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1882 where he was instructed by Alexandre Cabanel, Raphaël Collin, and Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929), known as an extreme naturalist. When Bastien-Lepage died in 1884, Dagnan-Bouveret became the leader of the Naturalist School. He definitely made an indelible impression on Vail. According to Louise Cann, Vail soon became an independent painter working at Pont-Aven and Concarneau. It is difficult to determine when he separated from his teachers since he is listed as a student whenever he exhibited at the Paris Salon — that is, until 1899 when he dropped the mention of élève. A picture of a peasant girl, Seulette was his Salon debut painting in 1883, the same year that he sent two scenes of Brittany to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' exhibition, which documents his stay in that region. The next year he exhibited in the Salon: Fishing Port, Concarneau, which went to the Luxembourg Museum (it is now in the Musée Municipal of Brest). It has the Naturalist brown and gray palette and tonalist atmosphere but already shows that Vail had direct experience with scenes of life in coastal villages: "So convincing was his familiarity with the French coast that the critic Thiébault-Sisson claimed him as a Frenchman and declared that no American marine painter could touch his skill." (Maureen C. O'Brien, in Blaugrund, 1989, p. 218). In 1885, Vail exhibited Inner Port at Dieppe and in the following year On the Thames (Private collection), which later won him the Grand Diploma of Honor from an international jury in Berlin in 1891. Widow, the title of Vail's entry in the Salon of 1887 (unlocated), is a striking image of a woman standing on a beach, looking out to the expanse of the ocean where her husband obviously met his end. The innocent child who looks at us may have the same fate in store for him. Then in 1888, Vail completed his masterpiece, Ready, About! a "wall-size" 94 x 125½ inch canvas. The painting won a first-class gold medal in the Salon of 1888, then at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, Vail won another gold medal. The first precedent that comes to mind is Théodore Géricault's colossal Raft of the Medusa of 1819 (Louvre), the celebrated romantic image of castaways about to be rescued after being lost at sea. But while Géricault presents a massive, sculpturesque group of figures struggling on a raft just beyond our designated viewing space, Vail pulls the viewer into the picture, or more exactly, extends the diagonally rocking boat into the spectator's area, vividly anticipating the effects of cinematography. There is no more effective way to engage the spectator's attention and sympathies, and the illusionism is especially effective in this life-size picture. Vail's vigorous brushwork — a uniform use of rectangular strokes — adds to the motion-filled, dynamic actuality of this image, and the overall green-gray tonalities evoke the constantly menacing, cold and wet travails in the life of the fishermen in the Atlantic's rough waters. Theodore Child (1889, p. 518) wrote about this painting: "very beautiful in color, and amongst the very strongest and best pictures of this kind in the Exhibition." Dordrecht (unlocated) was Vail's painting exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1892, and in the following year he showed Fisherman — The North Sea at the Paris Salon, the same year in which he re-exhibited Dordrecht and On the Thames at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Vail won the coveted Légion d'Honneur in 1894. Some of his paintings found their way to European museums, for example, Soir de novembre (Odessa Museum) and Soir de Bretagne (Museo d'Arte Moderna, Venice). The latter was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. Also there was Voix de la mer (Voices of the Sea), which we identify as the painting that appears in an interior view of the American section, just to the right of a doorway (fig. 20 in Fischer, 1999), a simple marine painting. Some time after 1900, Vail turned to both impressionism and post-impressionism but no one seems to have charted this course. His Autumn near Beauvais, illustrated in International Studio (1902, p. 211), The Flags, St. Mark's Venice (1903; National Gallery of Art), and Grand Canal, Venice, ca. 1904 (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design) demonstrate an impressionist technique with broken color. Mandel (1977, p. 202) wrote on the latter: "applied in short strokes juxtaposing brilliant hues of orange, blue, white, black and red, with a strong interplay between the warm pink tones of the walls and the green shadows of the black boats which are silhouetted against them." Cann (1937) believed that in Venice, Vail "found his true self." The Flags forecasts the Armistice Day pictures by Hassam and others, painted fifteen years later. Vail became involved in the Society of American Artists in Paris and the Société Internationale de Peinture et de Sculpture, whose membership included Frank Brangwyn, Charles Cottet (1863-1924), the famous Naturalist sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831-1905), Frits Thaulow (1847-1906), the painter of northern snowscapes, Walter Gay, and the post-impressionists Henri Martin (1860-1943) and Henri Le Sidanier (1862-1939). The group was represented by the Galerie Georges Petit. Naturally, such an association encouraged the seeking out of more modernist directions. In his Swiss mountain landscapes...

Albert Rosenthal (1863 - 1939) Milliner's Shop (In Seal and Sable), 1914 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches Signed and dated lower right Housed in a E.C Slater Frame Provenance: The artist Gift to the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts of the City of Detroit, 1924 Sotheby's New York, American Art, March 14, 2001, Lot 115 Spanierman Gallery, New York Doyle New York, Doyle at Home, January 15, 2013, Lot 81 Exhibited: New York, Ferargil Galleries, before 1919. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 114th Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, February 9 - March 30, 1919 (as Millinery). Missouri, City Art Museum of St. Louis, Fifteenth Annual Exhibition, September 15 - October 31, 1920 (as In Seal and Sable). Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts of the City of Detroit, Tenth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists (as The Millinery), April 23 - May 31, 1924. Literature: Marion E. Fenton, "Art," Vogue, 54, November 1, 1919, p. 154, illustrated (as Millinery). A painter, etcher, and expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art, Albert Rosenthal studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Munich, and in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme. Although his paintings consist mostly of portraits-many depicting historically important American political and military figures-he also rendered modern life images in the realist mode of the Ashcan School, such as Millinery. The subject in this painting tries on one of the large Duchess-style hats popular in the early 1910s, choosing it over the bonnet displayed on the table. Her considered decision-making reflects the importance women once placed on their hats, as statements of social status. (Degas, Manet, and Pissarro also painted this subject.) In 1919, Rosenthal's Millinery was illustrated in Vogue magazine with the caption: "A clever bit of work, spontaneous and vivid and handled with a light sure touch was 'Millinery.'" Rosenthal exhibited the work in the following year with the title In Seal and Sable and gifted it to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1924, after its inclusion in the museum's annual exhibition. Albert Rosenthal was born in Philadelphia in 1863 and was known as a painter, etcher and lithographer. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art under his father Max Rosenthal...

Robert Cozad Henri (1865 - 1929) Haarlem Windmill, Holland, 1907 Oil on panel 5 x 6 1/2 inches Signed, titled, and dated on the reverse Provenance: Collection of Ezra & Cecile Zilkh...

Bold portrait of a woman in riding clothes. Oil on board by American painter William E. Prather. Signed and dated 1918. In the original Whistler style frame. Please, contact us for s...

Antique American Ashcan School oil painting. Oil on board, circa 1910. Signed illegibly. Image size, 13L x 10H. Housed in a period Barbizon frame.

From the estate of the artist Margery Ryerson was a pupil of Charles Hawthorne at the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, MA and with Ashcan artist Rob...

From the estate of the artist Margery Ryerson was a pupil of Charles Hawthorne at the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, MA and with Ashcan artist Robert Henri at the Art Students ...

A gorgeous early 20th Century ashcan school painting depicting a man in period clothes reading by the light of a window. Just outside the light dappled room and scene an intriguing ...

Louis Henry Charles Moeller (1855 - 1930) Game of Chess Oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches Titled, and inscribed "...By Louis Muller [sic], N.A." on the stretcher A native of New York, Louis Henri Moeller became one of America's foremost anecdotal genre painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A favorite subject was distinguished elderly men going about everyday activities in gentile interior settings that reflected Victorian tastes. He was the son of a decorative painter and was initially taught by his father and then attended classes at the National Academy of Design. For six years, he studied in Munich with Frank Duveneck, Ludwig Lofftz, and Feodor Dietz and during this period was part of a group of American artists emulating 17th century Dutch masters. Returning to New York, he opened a studio and did decorative painting while developing the genre style for which he is known. He earned the National Academy's Hallgarten Prize for a small painting entitled "Puzzled" and was made an Associate Member. The genre paintings for which Moeller became known are small in format. Small animated figures vie for the viewer's attention with objects treated almost as independent still-life elements. The objects are often "objects de...

An original oil painting by American Ashcan school artist Alexander Levy depicting a beautiful young woman examining her pet inside its cage. This work comes directly from the fam...