Leather Covered Horse Statue

Born in 1919, Bill Chappell grew up as a west Texas ranch hand and experienced all the hardships and joys known by cowboys of a passing era. His early life and keen-eyed observation shaped his thinking and his art. Before the age of 10, he was making clay sculptures, paintings and wood and leather carvings. His leather work expanded into saddlery and he began making silver buckles and accessories. His wife, Fay, was always a constant inspiration to his work. After their marriage, in 1939, Bill served in the US Navy and was put in charge of occupational therapy using leather crafts.

After the war, he returned to Seymour, Texas, where he owned and operated a saddle and boot shop until 1953. It was during this time one of his most outstanding works was done, a life-size leather carving of Will Rogers, which was shown in the “Cowboy Hall of Fame”, in Oklahoma City, for several years. His leather carving and artistic skills were given special recognition, when he was commissioned to make the first saddle for the World Champion Rodeo Cowgirl in 1951. Armed with only a 6th grade education, Bill continually read about and tried new things. He became an avid oil painter, after moving to Colorado, in 1953. In 1965, he sold his saddle shop to begin painting and doing bronzes full time. Both mediums found ready acceptance from collectors, throughout the nation. He and Fay split their time between Colorado and Texas, as he continued his work in art, until his passing, on September 22, 2010, at the age of 91. Magazine covers that featured his work include: Western Horseman, Paint Horse Journal and Craftsman Magazine. Feature articles were covered in: Wild West Magazine, Cowboy Magazine, Western Horseman, Southwest Art and Art West.

Beginning in 1980, for 19 years, Bill donated a special painting to The South Texas Children's Home in Beeville, Texas, for their Christmas card. Major art collections in which Bill Chappell's work appears include: Bob Rockwell, Corning, New York, Cid Richardson Foundation, Fort Worth, Texas, Maybe Foundation, Midland, Texas, Cullen Foundation, Houston Endowment, Rockwell Foundation of Houston, Parker Collection of Tulsa (Oklahoma), The King Collection, Fine Arts Center of Pueblo, Colorado, Ben E. Keath, Dallas, Texas, Stanford Museum, Texas, Barnard's Mill (Fielder Foundation), Leanin' Tree Museum and Buckaroo Hall of Fame Museum, Winnemucca, Nevada.

His sculpture has received such wide acceptance that each piece is reserved by number. In the book Cowboy in America by Ed Hainsworth, Mr. Chappell has been recognized. He has worked on exhibits and in permanent collections in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Austin, Texas, Scottsdale, Arizona, Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico and in Denver, Colorado.

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

Find a collection of authentic Impressionist art on 1stDibs.

It could be argued that cave walls were the canvases for the world’s first landscape paintings, which depict and elevate natural scenery through art, but there is a richer history to consider.

The Netherlands was home to landscapes as a major theme in painting as early as the 1500s, and ink-on-silk paintings in China featured mountains and large bodies of water as far back as the third century. Greeks created vast wall paintings that depicted landscapes and grandiose garden scenes, while in the late 15th century and early 16th century, landscapes were increasingly the subject of watercolor works by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Bartolomeo.

The popularity of religious paintings eventually declined altogether, and by the early 19th century, painters of classical landscapes took to painting out-of-doors (plein-air painting). Paintings of natural scenery were increasingly realistic but romanticized too. Into the 20th century, landscapes remained a major theme for many artists, and while the term “landscape painting” may call to mind images of lush, grassy fields and open seascapes, the genre is characterized by more variety, colors and diverse styles than you may think. Painters working in the photorealist style of landscape painting, for example, seek to create works so lifelike that you may confuse their paint for camera pixels. But if you’re shopping for art to outfit an important room, the work needs to be something with a bit of gravitas (and the right frame is important, too).

Adding a landscape painting to your home can introduce peace and serenity within the confines of your own space. (Some may think of it as an aspirational window of sorts rather than a canvas.) Abstract landscape paintings by the likes of Korean painter Seungyoon Choi or Georgia-based artist Katherine Sandoz, on the other hand, bring pops of color and movement into a room. These landscapes refuse to serve as a background. Elsewhere, Adam Straus’s technology-inspired paintings highlight how our extreme involvement with our devices has removed us from the glory of the world around us. Influenced by modern life and steeped in social commentary, Straus’s landscape paintings make us see our surroundings anew.

Whether you’re seeking works by the world’s most notable names or those authored by underground legends, find a vast collection of landscape paintings on 1stDibs.