Sports Photography

Painting from what he calls “the middle ground of common experience,” Trujillo uses his environments as the foundation for a personal vision. He depicts places common to North Americ...

Harry Humphrey Moore led a cosmopolitan lifestyle, dividing his time between Europe, New York City, and California. This globe-trotting painter was also active in Morocco, and most importantly, he was among the first generation of American artists to live and work in Japan, where he depicted temples, tombs, gardens, merchants, children, and Geisha girls. Praised by fellow painters such as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Moore’s fame was attributed to his exotic subject matter, as well as to the “brilliant coloring, delicate brush work [sic] and the always present depth of feeling” that characterized his work (Eugene A. Hajdel, Harry H. Moore, American 19th Century: Collection of Information on Harry Humphrey Moore, 19th Century Artist, Based on His Scrap Book and Other Data [Jersey City, New Jersey: privately published, 1950], p. 8). Born in New York City, Moore was the son of Captain George Humphrey, an affluent shipbuilder, and a descendant of the English painter, Ozias Humphrey (1742–1810). He became deaf at age three, and later went to special schools where he learned lip-reading and sign language. After developing an interest in art as a young boy, Moore studied painting with the portraitist Samuel Waugh in Philadelphia, where he met and became friendly with Eakins. He also received instruction from the painter Louis Bail in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1864, Moore attended classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and until 1907, he would visit the “City by the Bay” regularly. In 1865, Moore went to Europe, spending time in Munich before traveling to Paris, where, in October 1866, he resumed his formal training in Gérôme’s atelier, drawing inspiration from his teacher’s emphasis on authentic detail and his taste for picturesque genre subjects. There, Moore worked alongside Eakins, who had mastered sign language in order to communicate with his friend. In March 1867, Moore enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, honing his drawing skills under the tutelage of Adolphe Yvon, among other leading French painters. In December 1869, Moore traveled around Spain with Eakins and the Philadelphia engraver, William Sartain. In 1870, he went to Madrid, where he met the Spanish painters Mariano Fortuny and Martin Rico y Ortega. When Eakins and Sartain returned to Paris, Moore remained in Spain, painting depictions of Moorish life in cities such as Segovia and Granada and fraternizing with upper-crust society. In 1872, he married Isabella de Cistue, the well-connected daughter of Colonel Cistue of Saragossa, who was related to the Queen of Spain. For the next two-and-a-half years, the couple lived in Morocco, where Moore painted portraits, interiors, and streetscapes, often accompanied by an armed guard (courtesy of the Grand Sharif) when painting outdoors. (For this aspect of Moore’s oeuvre, see Gerald M. Ackerman, American Orientalists [Courbevoie, France: ACR Édition, 1994], pp. 135–39.) In 1873, he went to Rome, spending two years studying with Fortuny, whose lively technique, bright palette, and penchant for small-format genre scenes made a lasting impression on him. By this point in his career, Moore had emerged as a “rapid workman” who could “finish a picture of given size and containing a given subject quicker than most painters whose style is more simple and less exacting” (New York Times, as quoted in Hajdel, p. 23). In 1874, Moore settled in New York City, maintaining a studio on East 14th Street, where he would remain until 1880. During these years, he participated intermittently in the annuals of the National Academy of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, exhibiting Moorish subjects and views of Spain. A well-known figure in Bay Area art circles, Moore had a one-man show at the Snow & May Gallery in San Francisco in 1877, and a solo exhibition at the Bohemian Club, also in San Francisco, in 1880. Indeed, Moore fraternized with many members of the city’s cultural elite, including Katherine Birdsall Johnson (1834–1893), a philanthropist and art collector who owned The Captive (current location unknown), one of his Orientalist subjects. (Johnson’s ownership of The Captive was reported in L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist,” New York Times, July 23, 1893.) According to one contemporary account, Johnson invited Moore and his wife to accompany her on a trip to Japan in 1880 and they readily accepted. (For Johnson’s connection to Moore’s visit to Japan, see Emma Willard and Her Pupils; or, Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary [New York: Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898]. Johnson’s bond with the Moores was obviously strong, evidenced by the fact that she left them $25,000.00 in her will, which was published in the San Francisco Call on December 10, 1893.) That Moore would be receptive to making the arduous voyage across the Pacific is understandable in view of his penchant for foreign motifs. Having opened its doors to trade with the West in 1854, and in the wake of Japan’s presence at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, American artists were becoming increasingly fascinated by what one commentator referred to as that “ideal dreamland of the poet” (L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist”). Moore, who was in Japan during 1880–81, became one of the first American artists to travel to the “land of the rising sun,” preceded only by the illustrator, William Heime, who went there in 1851 in conjunction with the Japanese expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry; Edward Kern, a topographical artist and explorer who mapped the Japanese coast in 1855; and the Boston landscapist, Winckleworth Allan Gay, a resident of Japan from 1877 to 1880. More specifically, as William H. Gerdts has pointed out, Moore was the “first American painter to seriously address the appearance and mores of the Japanese people” (William H. Gerdts, American Artists in Japan, 1859–1925, exhib. cat. [New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1996], p. 5). During his sojourn in Japan, Moore spent time in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Nikko, and Osaka, carefully observing the local citizenry, their manners and mode of dress, and the country’s distinctive architecture. Working on easily portable wood panels, he created about sixty scenes of daily life, among them this picturesque vignette of a Japanese tea garden...

Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hardscrabble upbringing in Detroit to become a po...

Signed (at lower right): A. Weiskopf

Signed (at lower right): A. Weiskopf

Oil 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...

Signed (on verso): Stanley Twardowicz

Signed (at lower right): L; (on verso): David Ligare

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...

Signed (on verso): Robert Minervini / 2019 / 2 Vases

Is it discomfort, or excitement, that you feel when you watch these women languidly roust, or subtly drift asleep? Do you happily play the voyeur, seduced by their beauty and the opu...

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...

Oil on canvas, 14 x 12 in.

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE '19

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...

Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882

Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021

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...

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2014

Randall Exon (b. 1956) was born in Vermillion, South Dakota. Exon earned his B.F.A. in painting from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. I...

Gouache on board, 20 x 24 in. Signed (at lower right): Atherton Painted about 1940 RECORDED: Art News (May 11, 1940), illus. [clipping citation] EXHIBITED: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1940, The International Watercolor Exhibition, no. 156, illus. on cover as Bird in Cage...

Signed and dated (at lower right): Randall Exon 2012

Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021

Signed (on stretcher): Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hardscrabble u...

Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hardscrabble upbringing in Detroit to become a po...

Oil on linen, 20 x 26 in.

Signed (on verso): Stanley Twardowicz

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...

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...

Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Laura Coombs Hills was the middle of five children born to Philip Knapp Hills, a town banker, and Mary Gerrish Hills. Little is known of Hills’s e...

Signed and dated (at lower left): J. STONE ROBERTS. /2019/20.

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...

Signed (lower right): Quincy

Oil and India ink on canvas, 34 1/4 x 54 1/4 in. Signed (at lower right): Joseph Lee Painted about 1876 EX COLL.: Captain Oscar Conrad Kustel (1834–1921), ...

Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2018

Signed on back

Signed and dated (on top edge of canvas): Robert Minervini 19

Oil 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...

Unsigned

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...

In his long and productive career, Clarence Holbrook Carter followed an independent course. He incorporated an unlikely mixture of stylistic influences, drawing from such disparate s...

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE 12

Oil on canvas

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE 21

Oil on canvas, 11 x 10 in.

Signed and dated (on verso): Robert Minervini 2019

Signed (at lower left): W.R. Miller/ 1851

Oil on canvas

Robert Minervini (b.1981 Secaucus, NJ) is an artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking, murals, and site-specific public art. His work examines spatial environments and notion...

Oil on panel

Signed and dated (at lower left): Randall Exon 07

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...

Estate stamp (on back, on original stretcher): Estate of/ Edmund Quincy/ 1903-1997 ///

Signed (on stretcher): Stanley Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hards...

Oil on canvas