Vintage Driving Lights

Gerald Harvey Jones was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1933. His grandfather was a cowboy during the trail-driving era when legends grew up along the dusty trails north from Texas. Family stories of wild cattle and tough men were absorbed by Harvey and became the genesis of his art. Known for paintings closely linked in mood and subject matter to Edouard Cortes, G Harvey created romanticized street scenes of the turn of the century towns in America. Rain slick streets reflect urban lights, and the weather, which was obviously cold. Harvey's early interest in sketching and drawing slowly evolved into a passion for painting in oils. After graduating cum laude from North Texas State University, Harvey took a position with the University of Texas in Austin, but he soon realized that weekends and nights at the easel did not satisfy his love of painting. He abandoned the security of a full-time job in 1963 and threw his total energy into a fine art career. It was through painting that he found his greatest satisfaction, and his native central Texas hill country provided the inspiration for most of his earlier work. He sought the essence that is Texas and found it not only along the banks of the Guadalupe, but in cow camps west of the Pecos, and in the shadows of tall buildings in big Texas cities and the streets of Dallas, which once echoed with the sound of horses hooves and the jingle of spurs. Historic photographs reveal what it looked like, but artists like Harvey can enable a viewer to experience the mood and flavor or the time. In his paintings, the viewer only sees the physical elements of his subject but also senses the mood that surrounds them. It is a remarkable aspect of fine art, which few artists are able to master.

Harvey painted the spirit of America from its western hills and prairies to the commerce of its great cities. His original paintings and bronze sculptures are in the collections of major corporations, prestigious museums, the United States government, American presidents, governors, foreign leaders and captains of industry. The Smithsonian Institution chose Harvey to paint The Smithsonian Dream, commemorating its 150th Anniversary. The Christmas Pageant of Peace commissioned Harvey to create a painting celebrating this national event. He has been the recipient of many awards and the subject of three books. Harvey was a soft-spoken and unassuming man who cared deeply about what he painted without becoming maudlin or melodramatic. Before his death, Harvey lived in Fredericksburg, Texas, with his wife Pat in a 150-year old stone home built by German settlers. His studio and residence were nestled within the Historic District of Fredericksburg.

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.

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