Auguste François Gorguet Art

Gaston Cornil. French ( b.1883 - d.1940 ). Récupérant Du Carburant Pour L’Hiver (Gathering Winter Fuel). Watercolor & Gouache On Buff Paper. Signed Lower Left. Image size 12.4 inches...

Beautiful mid century landscape of a historic California mission, highlighting its iconic architectural details such as a columned arches, white was...

A watercolor depicting a mountain view and the lake Gruyère, (Lac De La Gruyère) in Switzerland by the American Impressionist and Tonalist Mary Rogers Williams (1857–1907). Signed M.R. Williams. On the verso, the artist wrote: ‘Painted in Gruyère July 1902.’ This is a newly discovered work by a rare woman artist who seldom appears on the art market. Small in scale, yet rich in atmosphere, power, and depth—a genuine little gem. Mary Rogers Williams was born in 1857, in Hartford, Connecticut, the fifth of six children to a local baker. Orphaned by the age of fourteen, she pursued art with remarkable determination, studying at Hartford’s Decorative Art Society and the Art Students League in New York under William Merritt Chase. Her early mentor was James Wells Champney. In 1888, she joined Smith College as associate professor of art, where she taught for nearly twenty years to help support her family. Alongside her academic career, she maintained a serious and evolving artistic practice, though much of it was pursued within the limitations of her era’s gender roles and financial pressures. Her work is often classified as a blend of Tonalism and Impressionism—movements that were just taking shape during her lifetime. Tonalists used subdued palettes to evoke mood rather than detail, while Impressionists leaned toward brighter colors and broader subjects. Williams, working independently of art-world factions, forged a style rooted in mood, light, and atmosphere. She painted luminous pastels, watercolors, and oils—portraits, landscapes, and intimate studies of daily life. Despite knowing figures like Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam, she rarely aligned herself with any artistic “school” and found many male contemporaries pretentious or repetitive. She famously dropped out of Whistler’s Paris school, calling him “a pompous fop surrounded by fawners.” Though Mary Cassatt and Williams were both American Impressionists living in Paris, they never met—Cassatt enjoyed wealth and elite circles, while Williams was a self-reliant educator without patrons. Williams traveled extensively throughout Europe—from the Arctic Circle to the ruins south of Naples—often alone or with her sister. She bicycled through fjords, hiked to medieval towns, and visited chateaux and harbors, all while sketching prolifically. She is likely the only 19th-century woman artist whose travels and daily life can be traced in such vivid, personal detail: what she ate, how she felt about fellow travelers, what she paid for trams, how the air smelled, what she wore, and how she missed home. She documented everything—museum visits, church restorations, conversations with hotel guests, and her frustrations with men’s treatment of women artists. These letters, rediscovered in 2012 in a family boathouse, provide an extraordinary insight into not only her art but the intellectual and emotional texture of her life. Her writings reveal not only artistic insight but the immense workload she carried. At Smith, she taught studio art and art history, organized faculty events, curated student exhibitions, wrote essays, handled housework, and even cooked and cleaned for her own lodgings. On vacations, she cooked for her family; in Europe, she waxed floors, painted walls, repaired clothing, and stoked fires—all while maintaining her painting and travel schedule. Unlike many of her male peers, she had no assistants, no household staff, and little inherited wealth. Yet, as her letters reveal, she never saw herself as a victim—she relished challenges and even the absurdities of her era, from Italian waiters pushing marriage to department heads at Smith dismissing women’s artistic capacity. Despite these challenges, Williams exhibited widely during her lifetime: Paris Salon (1899) National Academy of Design (1903–04) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, Art Association of Indianapolis, and more. She was praised in The New York Times, Hartford Courant, and Springfield Republican, and compared by peers to figures like Emily Dickinson—another New England woman of quiet yet profound artistic power. But unlike Dickinson, Mary Williams...

Small-scale yet bold multi-colored abstracted figurative landscape of a horse rider in a canyon (a study after Edgar Payne’s works) by Tiffanie Mang (Ameri...

Alphonse Mucha worked mainly as a poster artist and became an influential figure of Art Nouveau in late 1890s, when poster illustrations were emerging as popular art form and new pri...

Gabriel Spat was born in Kishinev, Russia, in 1890. Leaving Russia in 1911, he studied at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and at the Academie Colarossi and the Academie de la ...

Alphonse Mucha worked mainly as a poster artist and became an influential figure of Art Nouveau in late 1890s, when poster illustrations were emerging as popular art form and new pri...

This luminous gouache captures a majestic mountain vista, likely set in California’s Sierra Nevada (possibly Yosemite). Two broad granite peaks with sunlit faces dominate the backgro...

“One of Mucha’s best Czech posters, printed by the firm of V. Neubert in the Smichov quarter of Prague, was for Princezna Hyacinta, a fairy-tale ballet and pantomime with music by Oskar Nedbal and libretto by Ladislav Novák. The portrait of the popular actress Andula Sedlácková as the princess dominates the poster. The plot develops as a dream of a village blacksmith who falls asleep after digging for a buried treasure. In his dreams he becomes lord of a castle, and his daughter Hanicka becomes the Princess Hyacinth. Of her three suitors, one is a sorcerer who abducts her to his underground palace, but she is rescued by a poor knight who looks like her real-life lover. Mucha used the motif of the hyacinth throughout the entire design, from embroideries to silver jewelry, and for an elaborate circle sparkling against the mossy green background. The portrait of the actress is seen against a sky full of stars and encircled with images from the dream: the blacksmith’s tools...

Alphonse Mucha worked mainly as a poster artist and became an influential figure of Art Nouveau in late 1890s, when poster illustrations were emerging as popular art form and new pri...

Rosie Phipps Green Fields Original Landscape Painting Water Colour Paint, Gouache and Pastel on Paper Image Size: H 10cm x W 25cm Mounted Size: H 18.5cm x W 34.5cm Framed Size: H 23c...

Harvest Time The Hills of Mt Tamalpais near Lake Bon Tempe 1890s The Hills around San Rafael in the 19th century were a time of work and play as seen in this watercolor near Lake Bon...