Cecil Crosley Bell Paintings

Monumental, important WPA painting signed by Percy Albee. The painting is oil canvas measuring 36" x 48". Titled verso "New Americans", this WPA painting was exhibited at the Carnegi...

An oil painting of cars parked along the street, coated with snow. Christmas lights sparkle in the yard behind the cars, a modest ranch house leaves the front porch light on, welcomi...

A quintessential American Scene landscape painted by the Chicago Modernist, William Schwartz. Workers in tilled fields surrounding a farmstead under dramatic skies. Painted in 1935...

NYC Cityscape American Scene WPA Modern Realism Mid 20th Century Architectural Ernest Fiene (1894-1965) Cityscape 36 x 30 inches Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1930. lower right Provenance Estate of the artist. ACA Galleries, New York Exhibited New York, Frank Rehn Gallery, Changing Old New York, 1931. New York, ACA Galleries, Ernest Fiene: Art of the City, 1925-1955, May 2-23, 1981, n.p., no. 5. BIO Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1894. As a teenager, Fiene immigrated to the United States in 1912. He studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1914 to 1918, taking day classes with Thomas Maynard and evening classes with Leon Kroll. Fiene continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York from 1916 to 1918, adding classes in printmaking at the Art Students League in 1923. Fiene began his career as an artist in 1919 with his first exhibition of watercolors at the MacDowell Club arranged by his mentor Robert Henri. In 1923 the Whitney Studio Club mounted a large exhibition of his works. The following year he had an exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, which completely sold out all fifty-two works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. With the proceeds of sales from the New Gallery exhibition, Ernest Fiene and his younger brother Paul, a sculptor, built studios in Woodstock, New York in 1925. In the early Twenties Ernest Fiene painted mostly landscapes of Woodstock and both the Ramapo and Hudson River Valleys. The first monograph from the Younger Artists Series was published on Fiene in 1922. Published in Woodstock, the series went on to include Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The book reproduced 1 illustration in color and another 27 reproductions in black and white. Around 1925 Fiene became fascinated with the intensity, excitement, and opportunities for color harmonies New York City offered as a subject. His paintings shifted to urban and industrial themes with architecture, industry, and transportation becoming his subjects. By 1926 Fiene had attracted the dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who gave him a one-man exhibition that year, which travelled to the Boston Arts Club. C.W. Kraushaar Galleries gave Fiene a one-man exhibition of urban, landscape, portrait, and still life paintings in 1927. Julianna Force, the director of the Whitney Studio Club and first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, included two of Fiene’s paintings in a fall exhibition in 1928. The Whitney Studio Club showed Fiene’s paintings in a two-man exhibition with Glenn O. Coleman that year and acquired three of Fiene’s paintings. Also in 1928 Fiene became affiliated with Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery where he had an exhibition of 20 lithographs in the spring. Fiene sold his house in Woodstock in 1928 to spend more of his time in New York City. With so many successful exhibitions, Fiene returned to Paris in 1928-29 where he rented Jules Pascin's studio and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In France, Fiene painted both landscape and urban subjects developed from ideas influenced by Cubist geometry and the use of flat areas of broad color. Upon returning to New York in 1930, Fiene used this new approach to continue to paint New York skyscraper and waterfront subjects, as well as to begin a series of paintings on changing old New York based on the excavations for Radio City Music Hall and the construction of the Empire State Building. Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries exhibited this series, titled “Changing Old New York,” in 1931. Fiene also has solo exhibitions at Rehn Galleries in 1930 and 1932. Fiene’s oil paintings are exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930 as well. Fiene was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans in December of 1931. Visiting New York, Henri Matisse saw the exhibition and called Fiene’s Razing Buildings, West 49th Street the finest painting he had seen in New York. Fiene had two mural studies from his Mechanical Progress series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers in 1932. Fiene sent View from my Window which depicts Fiene working on a lithograph stone while looking out his window to the newly completed Empire State Building to the Carnegie International in 1931. In 1932 Fiene participated in the first Biennial of American Painting at the Whitney Museum and his prints were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Wehye Gallery. In the same year, Fiene was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to further study mural painting in Florence, Italy. On his return from Italy in 1933 Fiene re-engaged himself in New York City life and won several public and private mural projects. Fiene resumed his active exhibition schedule, participating in two group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and a one-man exhibition of recent paintings at the Downtown Gallery in January 1934. In 1933 he purchased a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, which added Connecticut scenes to his landscape subjects. This was also the year Fiene began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine, where he painted seascapes, harbor scenes, and still lifes. Fiene’s landscape paintings attracted numerous commissions as part of the American Scene movement. Through the fall and winter of 1935-36, Fiene took an extended sketching trip through the urban, industrial, and farming areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Most of the twenty-four Pennsylvania urban and rural paintings...

Till the Clouds Roll By 1945 Frank Sinatra Mid Century Modern Hollywood Film WPA TILL THE COULDS ROLL BY (Film Set), oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches signed “Richard Whorf” lower right and signed and dated on the verso “R. Whorf/ Dec. 21, 1945. Frame by Hendenryk. ABOUT THE PAINTING This painting is from the collection of Barbara and Frank Sinatra, dated December 21, 1945 (just nine days after Frank Sinatra’s 30th birthday), and depicts the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Culver City backlot during the filming of Till the Clouds Roll By, the direction of the film having been taking over by Richard Whorf in December 1945. It is not presently clear if Whorf gave the Sinatras this painting as a gift, as the presence of the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries label on the verso indicates the painting may have been sourced there. Frank and Nancy Sinatra acquired a number of works from Dalzell Hatfield Galleries during the 1940’s, or perhaps they framed it for the couple. Sinatra performed “Old Man River’ in the film. Sinatra and June Allyson are depicted in the center of the painting. PROVENANCE From the Estate of Mrs. Nancy Sinatra; Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. An image of the Dalzell Hatfield label and the back of the original frame (which we replaced with a stunning Heydenrk frame) are attached. Nancy Sinatra was Fran's first wife. Nancy Rose Barbato was 17 years old when she met Frank Sinatra, an 18-year-old singer from Hoboken, on the Jersey Shore in the summer of 1934. They married in 1939 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City where Frank gave Nancy a recording of a song dedicated to her titled "Our Love" as a wedding present. The young newlyweds lived and worked in New Jersey, where Frank worked as an unknown singing waiter and master of ceremonies at the Rustic Cabin while Nancy worked as a secretary at the American Type Founders. His musical career took off after singing with big band leaders Harry James and Tommy Dorsey...

This large painting is a ca. 1960 copy of a famous Rockwell Kent painting that was executed in Vermont in 1921. The work is oil on canvas and well represents the original image, tho...

A wonderful realistic portrait of the Penobscot, a mid-19th century coastal sidewheel steamer, rendered in Cameron’s hallmark marine portrait style - technically meticulous, historically informed, and visually serene. Executed with crisp linework and a soft, luminous palette, the ship is shown in profile navigating calm Atlantic waters under both steam and sail, her red paddle box emblazoned boldly with her name. Commissioned in 1843 by Menemon Sanford’s Steamship Line and constructed in New York, the Penobscot was a near twin to her sister ship, the Kennebec, but became especially prized for her seaworthiness. Measuring 228 feet in length with a 48-foot beam and twin 14-foot paddlewheels, she carried schooner rigging fore and aft, providing the added stability necessary for coastal and offshore passages. Initially assigned to the Maine coastal excursion routes, she would later be reassigned to the elite New York–Philadelphia line and eventually sold and renamed Norfolk for pre-Civil War service along the southern coast. This work is oil on canvas and is signed in the lower right. It is housed in its original black frame and retains the artist’s description of the ship on the reverse. Size: 22 inches tall by 44 inches wide (painting) 26 inches tall by 48 inches wide by 1 inch deep (frame) Provenance: Private collection; Acquired from the above About the artist: A Delaware artist, Scott Cameron paints the simple elegance of the America’s Cup races, serene coastal marsh scenes, timeless landscape vistas and historic steamboats in a style reminiscent of the era in which they reigned. An admirer of Andrew Wyeth and the Brandywine School of painters, Scott has combined the detail and quiet stillness of that School in his landscapes with the Luminist School’s sense of light glowing from within. A soft gentle atmosphere seems to fall over each scene adding to the peacefulness of the setting, and a sense of a time gone by. His America’s Cup scenes capture the action at a moment in time, allowing the beauty of the wind-filled sails to become the central design element of each painting. Scott Cameron has exhibited his oil paintings in numerous national and regional shows from the Mystic Seaport Museum to solo and group shows in some of the foremost galleries throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. Favorite painting locations are the waterways and coastal inlets of Martha’s Vineyard and Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the gentle rolling landscapes of rural Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Meticulous research is behind every historic steamboat and America’s Cup painting...

A nice American modernist landscape painting, dating from the 1940s. This work is on the manner of E. Oscar Thalinger, but does not appear to be signed. The work is unframed, as it...

An accomplished American Scene painter, Clyde Singer successfully captured everyday life during his long career. A unique aspect of American life is depicted in this painting, entitl...

"Untitled" portrays a young female nude in an intimate setting within the artist's studio. This painting is done in the classical vein of full portraiture. The model, however, is not posed quietly, but is engaged with a person or object off the frame, or, perhaps in an interior monologue with herself. Regardless of which, the viewer's attention is not only attracted to the beauty of the model's figure, but the intention of her actions. Charles Pompilius...

Landscape, c. 1930-40s, oil on panel, signed lower right, 16 x 20 inches Jeanette Maxfield Lewis was a California-based landscape painter and etcher. Born in Oakland, she spent much...

Mario Larrinaga was born in Baja California in 1895 and moved with his brother to Los Angeles in 1909. He had no formal training in art, but had natural talent that was noticed by local movie studios. He was hired by Universal Studios as a designer, art director and creator of background scenes. He produced some of the background effects for King Kong in 1933. After a career in set design and illustration he focused on painting for pleasure in California, Mexico and Hawaii. He belonged to local art clubs and exhibited his works often. This stylized modernist work was likely created around 1960. It is oil on wood panel and of a horizontal format, 18” x 36”. It portrays a procession of seemingly Hawaiian natives...