Unknown

First Bank in Philadelphia

Signed lower right. James R. Bingham was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. During World War II, he put in a stint animating Army Air Force films and received an appointment as a Naval officer attached to the Office of Research and Invention. Following the war, the heroics and adventure in his life was confined to the usual subject matter of his illustrations, such as a long series of pictures for Erle Stanley Gardner’s “Perry Mason...

In this richly detailed oil painting from 1905, American artist Winfield Lukens captures a bustling maritime streetscape outside a mid-19th-century merchant storefront. This work exe...

Downtown New York, c. 1930s, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 10 x 12 inches; label verso reads: "Harry Dix / Title Downtown New York / Medium Oil" Harry Dix was a 20th-century p...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse), c. 1930s, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, signed lower right; presented in a newer silver painted frame About the Painting Writing about an exhibition of Charles W. Adams’ work at the Eighth Street Art Gallery in the mid-1930s, Emily Grenauer observed in The World-Telegram that the artist’s paintings were “distinguished for their solid form, well organized design and sumptuous color” and the art critic for The Herald Tribune found Adam’s work “a strong, formal realization of his subject . . . he paints with vital emphasis on structure and composition.” Although we do not know which works these critics referenced, it is likely they were writing about paintings like Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse). With its carefully designed reality, strong angles, solid forms, and well-disciplined puffs of smoke in the background, Adams presents a highly structured version of the Greenwich Village landmark, the Jefferson Market Library, which was a courthouse at the time Adams completed this work. The Jefferson Market Library was a prized subject for downtown painters, including the Ashcan School painter, John Sloan, the modernist, Stuart Davis, and the precisionist, Francis Criss...