Thomas Fransioli

Street Scene in Bar-le-Duc

1952

Signed (lower right): Quincy

Estate stamp (on back, on original stretcher): Estate of/ Edmund Quincy/ 1903-1997 ///

Signed (lower right): Quincy

In 1852, twenty-nine year old William Bradford was a failing shopkeeper in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. With a wife and child at home, Bradford, by his own admission, “spent too much time in painting to succeed” in business. Rescued from insolvency by his well-to-do in-laws, this is not the beginning of a narrative that generally leads to a happy ending. Not so with Bradford, who ultimately found international fame and fortune as a painter of arctic seascapes and dramatic marine paintings. William Bradford, the artist, was a lineal descendant of the 17th-century Separatist leader William Bradford, a founder of the Plymouth Plantation, signer of the Mayflower Compact and Governor of the Plymouth Colony. Our Bradford born to a New Bedford ship outfitter in Fairhaven, Massachusetts By the nineteenth century, this line of Bradfords were Quakers, living on the tract purchased nearly two centuries earlier by their pilgrim ancestor. Fairhaven, across the mouth of the Acushnet River from the whaling center of New Bedford was described by a New York journalist in 1857 as “the Brooklyn of New Bedford” (Home Journal, January 3, 1857). Young Bradford displayed an early predilection for the arts, but his Quaker parents were disinclined to support this particular pursuit. After working in his father’s business and then for a dry goods merchant in New Bedford, by 1849 Bradford had set up in New Bedford as a “merchant tailor” offering outfits for “those going to California,” “seamen’s clothing,” custom-tailored “piece goods...

Joshua Shaw was a farmer’s son, born in Billingborough, Lincolnshire, and orphaned at the age of seven. After a boyhood of privation, he tried a number of occupations, until he finally apprenticed to a sign painter and found his métier. Shaw went to Manchester to study art, and by 1802 was in Bath, painting landscapes. In that year he began to exhibit his work at the Royal Academy in London. Essentially self-taught, Shaw achieved an impressive level of competence and versatility, producing portraits, floral compositions, still lifes, landscapes, and, cattle pieces. Shaw continued to send works for exhibition at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery, all in London, until 1841. (Although Shaw is regularly mentioned and frequently illustrated in a host of general books on American art history, as well as included in numerous historical survey exhibitions, the only monographic study of this artist is Miriam Carroll Woods, “Joshua Shaw [1776–1860]: A Study of the Artist and his Paintings” [M.A. thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1971]. Apart from short biographical sketches in various dictionaries and museum collection catalogues, the two most interesting references, both contemporary, are John Sartain’s personal recollections in The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 1808–1897 [1899; reprint 1969] and an article in Scientific American from August 7, 1869, “Joshua Shaw, Artist and Inventor.” The article quotes extensively from an autobiographical document in the possession of Shaw’s grandson that Shaw prepared for William Dunlap...

Thomas Fransioli, born in 1906 in Seattle, Washington, trained as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as an architect before his service in World War II. Largel...

Signed Lower Left Poskas was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, a small industrial city set on the banks of the Naugatuck River. He was interested in art as a child, but on entering ...

Landscape painting with mustard flowers under a warm sky. Created on a circular canvas that is 48 inches across (4 feet in diameter.) The original work of art ...

Willard Dixon is a celebrated American Realist artist whose skies bridge realism with abstraction, as he so beautifully depicts sweeping skies, capturing their light and atmosphere on his canvases created with oil paint. This circular canvas is 4 feet across and tall, and is one of the smallest that the he has created. Beautiful over a bed, or dining room. Proudly presented by Andra Norris...

An oil painting by Lowell Nesbitt from 1973. A very large scale, hyper-realist painting of a rose in black background. Artist: Lowell Blair Nesb...

Exhibited: National Academy of Design, New York, 1906 (as no. 101) Art Institute of Chicago, 1908 (as no. 74)

"Scouting" is an oil on canvas painting by Frank Tenney Johnson. The framed piece measures 23 3/4 x 27 3/4 x 3 1/4 inches. Johnson was well-known for his work of the American west, particularly for his portrayal of cowboys at night, lit by moonlight. Johnson utilized knives and fingers when painting, so his work is recognizable for its distinctive marks. Provenance: Biltmore Galleries, Scottsdale...