Adaa Art Dealers Association Of America Paintings

Oil painting with deep blue and bright greens on canvas. Thickly textured.

William John Hennessy was born in Ireland. He came to America in 1849 with his mother and brother a year after his father had fled their homeland after taking part in the unsuccessful Young Ireland Party uprising. The Hennessys settled in New York, and when young William came of age, he decided upon a career as an artist. At the age of fifteen, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he learned to draw from the antique, and the following year he was granted admission to the Academy’s life-drawing class. Hennessy first exhibited at the National Academy in 1857, starting a continuous run of appearances in their annuals that lasted until 1870, when he expatriated himself to Europe. During his time in America, Hennessy was principally known as a genre painter and prolific illustrator for such publications as Harper’s Weekly and a number of books, including illustrated works of William Cullen Bryant...

Signed (at lower right): DJ [monogram]; (on back): David Johnson 1865

Quim Bove' first picked up a paintbrush when he was six, and hasn't put it down since. Born in the Catalonia region of Spain along the Pyrenees, he became fluent in Spanish, French ...

Gregory Amenoff’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Cleveland Museum of...

Abstract ink painting on canvas.

Louisa Lizbeth Chase was born in 1951 to Benjamin and Wilda Stengel Chase in Panama City, Panama, where her father, a West Point graduate, was stationed. The family moved to Pennsylv...

Fransioli was born in Seattle, Washington, and received a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930. He worked with John Russell Pope on plans for the exhibition galleries at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which he pinpointed as the beginning of his interest in painting. World War II interrupted a promising career in architecture. Fransioli served in the Pacific Theatre from 1943 until 1946, and was among the first American soldiers to survey Hiroshima after the atomic bomb’s detonation in August 1945. He returned to civilian life and took up painting, basing himself in Boston, but working up and down the eastern seaboard. Thomas Fransioli’s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, their forms squarely defined by stark light and long shadows. Saturated color permeates every corner of his canvases, from vibrant oranges and greens to smoky terra cottas and granites. Even the trees that line Fransioli’s streets, parks, and squares are sharp and angular, exactly like those in an architect’s elevation rendering. But Fransioli’s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for parked cars and an occasional black cat scurrying across the pavement. People make rare appearances in Fransioli’s compositions, and never does the entropy of a crowd overwhelm their prevailing sense of order and precision. People are implied in a Fransioli painting, but their physical presence would detract from the scene’s bleak and surreal beauty. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli’s artistic viewpoint. The term was first broadly applied to contemporary American art in the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists. As exhibition curator Dorothy Miller noted in her foreword to the catalogue, Magic Realism was a “widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art…. It is limited, in the main, to pictures of sharp focus and precise representation, whether the subject has been observed in the outer world—realism, or contrived by the imagination—magic realism.” In his introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein took the concept a step further: “Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed.” This is Fransioli, in a nutshell. His cityscapes exist in time and space, but certainly not in the manner in which he portrays them. Fransioli—and other Magic Realists of his time—was also the heir to Precisionism, spawned from Cubism and Futurism after the Great War and popularized in the 1920s and early 1930s. While Fransioli may not have aspired to celebrate the Machine Age, heavy industry, and skyscrapers in the same manner as Charles Sheeler, his compositions tap into the same rigid gridwork of the urban landscape that was first codified by the Precisionists. During the 1950s, Fransioli was represented by the progressive Margaret Brown...

Louisa Lizbeth Chase was born in 1951 to Benjamin and Wilda Stengel Chase in Panama City, Panama, where her father, a West Point graduate, was stationed. The family moved to Pennsylv...

John Moore was born in St. Louis, MO in 1941. He received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis (1966) and an MFA from Yale University (1968). Over a career spanning forty ye...

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait was born at Livesey Hall, near Liverpool, England, and began his career as a clerk at the gallery of Agnew & Zanetti’s Repository of Arts in Manchester. While...

Pigment and aluminum dust on canvased board. Whimsical painting of a ballerina dancer.

Pigment and aluminum dust on canvased board. Whimsical image of a dancer with puppet strings.

Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882

Vase of Flowers Oil on tin, 13 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. Signed (at lower left): C. Eaton

Thomas Fransioli’s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, trees are sharp, and saturated color permeates the scene. But Fransioli’s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for the rare appearance of figure and the occasional black cat scurrying across pavement. Instead, humanity is implied. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli’s viewpoint. First applied to American art in the 1943 MoMA exhibition “American Realists and Magic Realists...

Louisa Lizbeth Chase was born in 1951 to Benjamin and Wilda Stengel Chase in Panama City, Panama, where her father, a West Point graduate, was stationed. The family moved to Pennsylv...

A child of the American South, Elliott Daingerfield was born in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where his father, C...

Pigment and aluminum dust on canvased board. Whimsical painting of a figure in the style of a classical nude.

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...

mixed media and collage on cardboard. Depiction of Butterfly Fantasy

It is infrequent, to say the least, that a diagnosis of tuberculosis proves fortuitous, but that was the event, in 1921, that set Paul Starrett Sample on the road to becoming a professional artist. (The best source for an overview of Sample’s life and oeuvre remains Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene, exhib. cat., [Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, 1988] with a detailed and definitive chronology by Sample scholar, Paula F. Glick, and an essay by Robert L. McGrath. It is the source for this essay unless otherwise indicated.) Sample, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896 to a construction engineer and his wife, spent his childhood moving with his family to the various locations that his father’s work took them. By 1911, the family had landed in Glencoe, Illinois, settling long enough for Paul to graduate from New Trier High School in 1916. Sample enrolled at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where his interests were anything but academic. His enthusiasms included the football and basketball teams, boxing, pledging at a fraternity, and learning to play the saxophone. After the United States entered World War I, Sample, to his family’s dismay, signed on for the Naval Reserve, leading directly to a hiatus from Dartmouth. In 1918 and 1919, Sample served in the U.S. Merchant Marine where he earned a third mate’s license and seriously contemplated life as a sailor. Acceding to parental pressure, he returned to Dartmouth, graduating in 1921. Sample’s undergraduate life revolved around sports and a jazz band he formed with his brother, Donald, two years younger and also a Dartmouth student. In November 1933, Sample summarized his life in a letter he wrote introducing himself to Frederick Newlin Price, founder of Ferargil Galleries, who would become his New York art dealer. The artist characterized his undergraduate years as spent “wasting my time intensively.” He told Price that that “I took an art appreciation course and slept thru it every day” (Ferargil Galleries Records, circa 1900–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available on line). In 1920, Donald Sample contracted tuberculosis. He went for treatment to the world-famous Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for the prescribed regimen of rest, healthful food, and fresh air. Visiting his brother in 1921, Paul also contracted the disease. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, and had no certain cure before the development of streptomycin in 1946. Even for patients who appeared to have recovered, there was a significant rate of recurrence. Thus, in his letter to Price, Sample avoided the stigma conjured by naming the disease, but wrote “I had a relapse with a bad lung and spent the next four years hospitalized in Saranac Lake.” The stringent physical restrictions imposed by adherence to “the cure” required Sample to cultivate an alternate set of interests. He read voraciously and, at the suggestion of his physician, contacted the husband of a fellow patient for instruction in art. That artist, then living in Saranac, was Jonas Lie (1880–1940), a prominent Norwegian-American painter and an associate academician at the National Academy of Design. Lie had gained renown for his dramatic 1913 series of paintings documenting the construction of the Panama Canal (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; United States Military Academy, West Point, New York). Primarily a landscape artist, Lie had a particular affinity for scenes with water. His paintings, impressionistic, atmospheric, and brushy, never strayed from a realistic rendering of his subject. Sample regarded Lie as a mentor and retained a lifelong reverence for his teacher. Sample’s early paintings very much reflect Lie’s influence. ` In 1925, “cured,” Sample left Saranac Lake for what proved to be a brief stay in New York City, where his veteran’s benefits financed a commercial art course. The family, however, had moved to California, in the futile hope that the climate would benefit Donald. Sample joined them and after Donald’s death, remained in California, taking classes at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In Sample’s account to Price, “I couldn’t stomach the practice of painting a lot of High Sierras and desert flowers which seemed to be the only kind of pictures that were sold here so I got a job teaching drawing and painting at the art school of the University of Southern California.” Initially hired as a part-time instructor, Sample progressed to full-time status and ultimately, by the mid-1930s, to the post of Chairman of the Fine Art Department. Sample, however, did not want to wind up as a professor. “Teaching is all right in small doses,” he wrote, “but I have a horror of drifting into being a college professor and nothing more.” At the same time as he taught, Sample began to exhibit his work in a variety of venues at first locally, then nationally. Though he confessed himself “a terrible salesman,” and though occupied with continued learning and teaching, Sample was nonetheless, ambitious. In 1927, he wrote in his diary, “I am eventually going to be a painter and a damned good one. And what is more, I am going to make money at it” (as quoted by Glick, p. 15). In 1928, Sample felt sufficiently solvent to marry his long-time love, Sylvia Howland, who had also been a patient at Saranac Lake. The Howland family were rooted New Englanders and in summertime the Samples regularly traveled East for family reunion vacations. While the 1930s brought serious hardship to many artists, for Paul Sample it was a decade of success. Buttressed by the financial safety net of his teacher’s salary, he painted realist depictions of the American scene. While his work addressed depression-era conditions with a sympathetic eye, Sample avoided the anger and tinge of bitterness that characterized much contemporary realist art. Beginning in 1930, Sample began to exhibit regularly in juried exhibitions at important national venues, garnering prizes along the way. In 1930, Inner Harbor won an honorable mention in the Annual Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year Sample was also represented in a show at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and at the Biennial Exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1931, Dairy Ranch won the second Hallgarten Prize at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York. Sample also made his first appearances at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1936, Miner’s Resting won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Always interested in watercolor, in 1936, Sample began to send works on paper to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York. While participating in juried exhibitions, Sample also cultivated commercial possibilities. His first New York art dealer was the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York, which included his work in a November 1931 exhibition. In 1934, Sample joined the Ferargil Galleries in New York, after Fred Price arranged the sale of Sample’s Church Supper to the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1937, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Sample’s Janitor’s Holiday from the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, a notable honor. As prestigious as this exhibition schedule may have been, by far Sample’s most visible presence in the 1930s and 1940s was the result of his relationship with Henry Luce’s burgeoning publishing empire, Time, Inc. Sample’s first contribution to a Luce publication appears to have been another San Pedro...

Randall Exon paints fusions of what he sees and what he imagines, creating imagery that is identifiable and yet somehow other-worldly. He draws inspiration from the farmlands along t...

In the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth, New York City art aficionados could count on finding recent work of Seymour Joseph Guy hanging on the walls of the city’s major galleries. Primarily a genre artist, but also a portraitist, between 1859 and 1908 Guy showed more than seventy works at the National Academy of Design. From 1871 to 1903 he contributed over seventy times to exhibitions at the Century Club. From 1864 to 1887, he sent about forty pictures to the Brooklyn Art Association. A good number of these works were already privately owned; they served as advertisements for other pictures that were available for sale. Some pictures were shown multiple times in the same or different venues. Guy was as easy to find as his canvases were omnipresent. Though he lived at first in Brooklyn with his family and then in New Jersey, from 1863 to his death in 1910 he maintained a studio at the Artist’s Studio Building at 55 West 10th Street, a location that was, for much of that period, the center of the New York City art world. Guy’s path to a successful career as an artist was by no means smooth or even likely. Born in Greenwich, England, he was orphaned at the age of nine. His early interest in art was discouraged by his legal guardian, who wanted a more settled trade for the young man. Only after the guardian also died was Guy free to pursue his intention of becoming an artist. The details of Guy’s early training in art are unclear. His first teacher is believed to have been Thomas Buttersworth...

William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, where he studied for several years with local artists, including the leading portraitist there, Abel Buel Moore. In 1850, he moved to ...

abstract watercolor and ink painting of intertwined tubular forms on archival paper.

watercolor and Ink painting of intertwined tubular forms on paper

abstract watercolor and ink painting of intertwined tubular forms on archival paper, varnished.

John Schieffer graduated in 1995 from Paier College of Art in Hamden, Connecticut with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. The salutatorian entered the world of illustration at Mercer Ma...

Charles Temple Dix was born in Albany, New York, the youngest son of the distinguished statesman and soldier, General John Adams Dix. Having already visited Europe as a child, Dix re...

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...

abstract watercolor and ink painting of intertwined tubular forms on archival paper

abstract watercolor and ink painting of intertwined tubular forms on archival paper

abstract watercolor and ink painting on archival paper depicting intertwined tubular forms. varnished.

abstract oil painting with gold acrylic on edge

abstract oil painting on linen with gold acrylic edge

John Schieffer graduated in 1995 from Paier College of Art in Hamden, Connecticut with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. The salutatorian entered the world of illustration at Mercer Ma...

John Schieffer's thoughts on his work: I believe that the most important aspect of my work and my story is the "why" I paint what I do.  I often don't reflect enough on this part of ...

watercolor, silver leaf on BFK paper

black and white landscape painting of lily pads. floral

oil on Arches paper

pigment on Roxy Music album cover signature located on the vinyl album

small oil painting on canvas.

oil painting on gessoed BFK paper, framed floating in white wood frame.

gouache and Chinese ink on paper

small oil painting on canvas

Oil painting on linen of chandelier in overgrown forest. nature trees landscape surreal

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1965, Ron Hicks was an avid artist from an early age. Hicks began his formal studies in art at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. Hicks continued his studies at the Colorado Art...

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE 12

ADAM STRAUS BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, 2018 oil on newspaper and shopping lists transferred and adhered to paper 40 x 60 in. 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Currently on e...

ADAM STRAUS STILL LOOKING FOR THE PROMISED LAND, 2018 oil on newspaper and shopping lists adhered to jute adhered to wood, framed in lead 41 x 63 in. 104.1 x 160 cm. In the exhibiti...

VALERIE HIRD THE ELDER GODS WEREN'T MALE, 2019 oil on gessoed Arches paper 80 x 150 in. 203.2 x 381 cm. each sheet 40 x 30 inches "Ancient Deity forms based on textiles collected du...

SAPERE AUDE. Dare to be wise. Immanuel Kant’s directive is embodied in the work of David Ligare. For forty years, Ligare has dedicated his work to classi...

cosmic energy crystallization

abstract watercolor and ink painting of intertwined tubular forms on archival paper, varnished.

abstract watercolor painting of intertwined tubular forms on a wood panel, varnished.

Ink painting on canvas.

color-filed painting, various shades of pink with gold on the edges