George Henry Hall On Sale

George Henry Hall was a popular and highly esteemed American artist, “in his time . . . the best-known specialist of still life in the mid-nineteenth century” (William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masters of American Still Life, 1801–1939 [1981], p. 93). Born in Manchester, New Hampshire, Hall was initially a self-taught portrait and genre painter, working in Boston from 1842 to 1849. He began to exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum in 1846 and showed there regularly through 1868. In 1848, Hall extended his patronage circle to New York City, selling three pictures to the American Art-Union. He began, as well, a mentoring correspondence with Andrew Warner, the influential Corresponding secretary of the Art-Union. Although Hall hoped to travel to Italy to hone his artistic skills, at Warner’s urging he amended his plan and agreed to study at the academy in Düsseldorf, Germany, which was becoming an important training ground for American painters. (For a discussion of American artists at Düsseldorf, see The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, The Düsseldorf Academy and the Americans: An Exhibition of Drawings and Watercolors, exhib. cat. [1972]. For an early reference in the literature to the Hall/Warner correspondence, see Patricia Hills, “The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson: The Sources and Development of His Style and Themes,” [Ph.D dissertation, New York University, 1973; Garland Pub., 1977], pp. 27–31.) Emanuel Leutze, a German-born American artist with strong ties to the Art-Union, had been among the first Americans to go to Düsseldorf, arriving in 1841. Richard Caton Woodville, another protégé of the Art Union, studied in Düsseldorf in 1845–46. In 1849, John Godfrey Boker opened his Düsseldorf Gallery in New York City, putting the merits of the German school front and center before the American art public. More than offering just encouragement, the Art-Union (presumably with Warner’s warm advocacy) subsidized Hall’s German study with the purchase of seven canvases in 1849. Hall traveled to Europe with his good friend, Eastman Johnson, who, at Hall’s urging, also solicited patronage from the Art-Union, and was rewarded by the purchase of two of his crayon drawings. Hall and Johnson sailed for Europe in August 1849, landing in Antwerp and making their way to Düsseldorf.

Hall remained in Düsseldorf for one year, moved to Paris for further study, and then went on to Rome before returning to New York in 1852. Although the Art-Union ceased operations in 1852, Hall settled in New York and exhibited his European-inspired genre and figure paintings (along with an occasional portrait) at the National Academy of Design, where he was elected an associate academician. In 1857, Hall showed Sweet Peas: A Study from Nature at the N.A.D. and A Study of Sweet Peas at the Boston Athenaeum, the first records of his exhibiting the still-life subjects for which he was to become well-known. As the subtitle “A Study from Nature” indicates, Hall’s early still-life work was influenced by the painting aesthetic of “truth to nature,” the rallying cry of the English art critic and arbiter of taste, John Ruskin. Hall’s still life paintings of the 1850s and 1860s are precisely drawn and colored evocations of fruits and flowers, very much consistent with the style of the American Pre-Raphaelites. (See Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, exhib. cat. [New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1985] for the most recent and thorough discussion of this subject.)

Hall exhibited energetically throughout his career and was a constant presence in the major annual exhibitions of his day. In addition to The Boston Athenaeum, the American Art Union, and the National Academy of Design, Hall also showed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, from 1853; the Brooklyn Art Association, New York, from 1861; The Boston Art Club, in 1881 and 1889; the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1888; and in London, at Grosvenor Gallery, in 1889 and 1890. In 1868 he was elected an academician at the National Academy of Design, taking an active role there as treasurer and as a member of the governing council at various times. He also belonged to the Century Club in New York City and frequently exhibited his pictures there, where they were seen by the artistic and literary elite of the time.

In the 1860s, Hall concentrated on still-life painting, a choice that appears to have been very financially rewarding. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal singled Hall out in a March 1860 article, “The Dollars and Cents of Art,” noting the handsome prices the artist was receiving for his still-life paintings (as cited in William H. Gerdts, op. cit., p. 93). Like a number of American artists, Hall periodically sold groups of his canvases in consolidated sales in order to raise money for foreign travel. In 1860, for example, Hall sold 143 paintings, many of them works that he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design, which realized sufficient money to support him in Spain for a number of years. On April 18, 1863, the New York Evening Post reported that “the sale at auction of the pictures of George W. [sic] Hall shows that the fine arts are not languishing” (transcript in Hirschl & Adler archives). Thus, even in the darkest days of the Civil War, Hall realized over $7,000 from a group of works whose images included both still-life and European genre subjects. In 1865, Hall did even better, raising over $12,000 in a sale of “seventy-five small but carefully elaborated fruit and flower pieces” (Henry Tuckerman, Book of the Artists [1867], p. 482).

Though never an expatriate, Hall demonstrated by his frequent and lengthy trips a great zest for the life of an American artist in Europe. He spent an accumulated twenty one years of his career on the Continent, primarily in Spain and Italy. In 1872, Hall went to Italy and lived for a year in Rome before marrying a woman from Capri. In 1875 and 1876, he traveled to Egypt and Palestine, extending his search for exotic subject matter and fanciful bric-a-brac to satisfy American tastes. Hall returned to Italy for a four-year stay in 1883. During this trip he established a close friendship with two expatriate American painters who were themselves best friends, Elihu Vedder and Charles Caryl Coleman. Coleman had owned a villa on Capri since 1880.

In the decade of the 1870s Hall resumed figure and genre work, while continuing his successful career as a still-life painter. In addition to extensive travel, he established studio/residences both in New York City and in the Catskill mountains. Beginning in 1867, Hall spent summers in the Catskills, near the village of Palenville. From 1874 to 1883, he was a tenant at the famous Studio Building on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, the center of New York City art life. In Palenville, Hall contributed to the local color by covering the chimney of his studio cottage with tiles he brought home from Spain, a design choice sufficiently idiosyncratic and exotic that the Hall cottage became one of the local tourist attractions. When Hall painted Still Life of Flowers in a White Vase in 1860, he was enjoying his first crest of popularity as a still-life painter. Here Hall puts these lovely and delicate flowers into a porcelain case and places them on his characteristic polished wood table, offering the viewer an image of grace, elegance and simple domestic charm.

Realist art attempts to portray its subject matter without artifice. Similar to naturalism, authentic realist paintings and prints see an integration of true-to-life colors, meticulous detail and linear perspectives for accurate portrayals of the world. 

Work that involves illusionistic techniques of realism dates back to the classical world, such as the deceptive trompe l’oeil used since ancient Greece. Art like this became especially popular in the 17th century when Dutch artists like Evert Collier painted objects that appeared real enough to touch. Realism as an artistic movement, however, usually refers to 19th-century French realist artists such as Honoré Daumier exploring social and political issues in biting lithographic prints, while the likes of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet painting people — particularly the working class — with all their imperfections, navigating everyday urban life. This was a response to the dominant academic art tradition that favored grand paintings of myth and history. 

By the turn of the 20th century, European artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were experimenting with nearly photographic realism in their work, as seen in the attention to every botanical attribute of the flowers surrounding the drowned Ophelia painted by English artist John Everett Millais.

Although abstraction was the guiding style of 20th-century art, the realism trend in American modern art endured in Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and other artists’ depictions of the complexities of the human experience. In the late 1960s, Photorealism emerged with artists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes giving their paintings the precision of a frame of film.

Contemporary artists such as Jordan Casteel, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Aliza Nisenbaum are now using the unvarnished realist approach for honest representations of people and their worlds. Alongside traditional mediums, technology such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive installations are helping artists create new sensations of realism in art.

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Figurative art, as opposed to abstract art, retains features from the observable world in its representational depictions of subject matter. Most commonly, figurative paintings reference and explore the human body, but they can also include landscapes, architecture, plants and animals — all portrayed with realism.

While the oldest figurative art dates back tens of thousands of years to cave wall paintings, figurative works made from observation became especially prominent in the early Renaissance. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance masters created naturalistic representations of their subjects.

Pablo Picasso is lauded for laying the foundation for modern figurative art in the 1920s. Although abstracted, this work held a strong connection to representing people and other subjects. Other famous figurative artists include Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Figurative art in the 20th century would span such diverse genres as Expressionism, Pop art and Surrealism.

Today, a number of figural artists — such as Sedrick Huckaby, Daisy Patton and Eileen Cooper — are making art that uses the human body as its subject.

Because figurative art represents subjects from the real world, natural colors are common in these paintings. A piece of figurative art can be an exciting starting point for setting a tone and creating a color palette in a room.

Browse an extensive collection of figurative paintings on 1stDibs.