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William Thon was an American artist noted for his highly abstracted landscape images. He was born in New York City and spent his childhood summers camping on Staten Island. He developed a great love of travel, and in 1933 made an eight-month voyage to Cocos Islands in the Pacific. He debuted as a professional artist in the 1939 Corcoran Gallery Biennial exhibition. He joined the Navy during World War II, and shortly after the war won the Prix de Rome, a fellowship in Rome to the American Academy, for which he later served as a trustee. He received further recognition with his participation in the 1942 '"Artists for Victory" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He held his first one-person show at the Midtown Galleries in New York in 1944. The gallery continued to represent him throughout his career. He had subsequent solo exhibitions at the Smith College Art Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. He received an honorary Doctor of Arts from the Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1957. He was a member of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy of Design. In 1947, Thon’s year-long study at the American Academy proved pivotal in his career, when he began working in watercolor. Upon his return to America, he submitted a watercolor to the 1949 exhibition of the National Academy of Design, and that year, he was voted into the Academy membership. From thereon, he frequently exhibited at the Academy and won prizes, including the Benjamin Altman Prize in 1951, 1954, 1961, 1967 and 1969. In 1951, Thon received a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He often traveled to Italy, and in 1955 served in Rome as Artist-in-Residence at the American Academy. Thon chose to live in the relative isolation of Port Clyde, Maine, on a peninsula overlooking the sea, a quiet place, especially in winter. He preferred the company of sailors, craftsmen, lobstermen, a few fellow artists and his beloved wife, Helen. This area is credited as inspiring a stylistic breakthrough for Thon when he discovered an abandoned quarry near his property. There, he created numerous, increasingly abstract paintings of spidery trees with rectilinear slabs of interspersed granite. Each season, Thon would send his paintings off to the prestigious Midtown Galleries in New York City. His works bore the imprint of his vital connection to the raw, natural beauty of rural Maine, its rugged terrain, beautiful virgin forests, intemperate seas, and the human-made scatter of wooden buildings along its rocky shoreline. Thon continued to work even after macular degeneration had left him legally blind. From his estate gift of four million dollars, the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, received the biggest cash donation to that time. Thon was awarded numerous prizes and is represented in over 60 museum collections including, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, and in Maine, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

Revitalize your interiors — introduce drawings and watercolor paintings to your home to evoke emotions, stir conversation and show off your personality and elevated taste.

Drawing is often considered one of the world’s oldest art forms, with historians pointing to cave art as evidence. In fact, a cave in South Africa, home to Stone Age–era artists, houses artwork that is believed to be around 73,000 years old. It has indeed been argued that cave walls were the canvases for early watercolorists as well as for landscape painters in general, who endeavor to depict and elevate natural scenery through their works of art.

The supplies and methods used by artists and illustrators to create drawings and paintings have evolved over the years, and so too have the intentions. Artists can use their drawing and painting talents to observe and capture a moment, to explore or communicate ideas and convey or evoke emotion. No matter if an artist is working in charcoal or in watercolor and has chosen to portray the marvels of the pure human form, to create realistic depictions of animals in their natural habitats or perhaps to forge a new path that references the long history of abstract visual art, adding a drawing or watercolor painting to your living room or dining room that speaks to you will in turn speak to your guests and conjure stimulating energy in your space.

When you introduce a new piece of art into a common area of your home — a figurative painting by Italian watercolorist Mino Maccari or a colorful still life, such as a detailed botanical work by Deborah Eddy — you’re bringing in textures that can add visual weight to your interior design. You’ll also be creating a much-needed focal point that can instantly guide an eye toward a designated space, particularly in a room that sees a lot of foot traffic.

When you’re shopping for new visual art, whether it’s for your apartment or weekend house, remember to choose something that resonates. It doesn’t always need to make you happy, but you should at least enjoy its energy. On 1stDibs, browse a wide-ranging collection of drawings and watercolor paintings and find out how to arrange wall art when you’re ready to hang your new works.