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 returned with his family to Italy from 1853 to 1855. Dix’s decision to become an artist was enthusiastically supported by his father, and after graduation from Union College, Schenectady, New York, Dix continued his art studies in New York City in the late 1850s. Dix quickly immersed himself in the New York art world. He occupied a studio at the famous Tenth Street Studio building from 1860 to 1862, and he exhibited annually at the National Academy of Design, New York, from 1857 to 1861, the year in which he was elected an associate of that institution. He never submitted the diploma painting required for qualification as a full member.
Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Dix joined the Union army, serving as a major and acting as his father’s aide-de-camp. His creative output during this period was curtailed by his involvement in wartime activities. In March 1865, at the close of the war, Dix resumed his artistic career. He left for Europe, spending the winter in Rome and visiting England sometime thereafter. It appears that he remained for at least some time, for in 1867 he exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. In 1868, he married Camilla Ottilie Watson, niece of the art historian, Mrs. Anne Brownell Jameson, in London, and the married couple soon settled in Rome. In January 1873, Dix joined other American artists in Rome in signing a resolution mourning the death of the much-admired Hudson River School painter, John F. Kensett. Dix’s brief period in Rome ended two months later, when he died at the age of 35 of a sudden hemorrhage of the lungs.
In the course of his short and promising career, Dix had established himself as a popular and successful painter of marine subjects, and he was one of the few such painters to elicit praise regularly from contemporary critics. In his Book of the Artists (1867), Henry Tuckerman called Dix a painter “of rare promise and no inconsiderable performance in the sphere of marine landscape” (p. 552), an unfortunately ironic forecast of the artist’s brief career.
Beginning about 1866, when he first wintered in Rome, Dix painted a number of marine subjects of the island of Capri. Marina Grand, Capri dates from that winter, before Dix’s trip to England and his subsequent marriage and relocation to Rome. Dix evidently traveled to the island, returning to Rome with sketches of its coastal scenery. Located on the northern side of the island, the Marina Grande was the chief port on Capri. Dix frames the composition at right with the large, rocky cliffs characteristic of Capri’s coastline, while the sweep of the water opens to the left. Dix’s use of color is deep and clear, faithfully capturing the incomparable range of blues of the Mediterranean sea and sky. All of the elements of the picture—rocks, clouds, boats, and water—are treated with careful accuracy, reflecting a truth-to-nature aesthetic as espoused by the influential English critic, John Ruskin, and echoing similar concerns with the rocky coast landscape as fellow American marine artist, William Stanley Haseltine. Marina Grande, Capri is remarkable in that the artist was only 28 years old when he painted it, and it leads one to speculate as to what Dix might have accomplished had he enjoyed a longer life and career.
(Biography provided by Hirschl & Adler)
Marina Grande, Capri
By Charles Temple Dix
Located in New York, NY
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...
Canvas, Oil
$2,750
H 26 in W 48 in D 1 in
“Kennebec” Ship Portrait Sidewheeler Steamboat Paddle Steamer Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
A striking and historically attentive portrait of the sidewheel steamer Kennebec, built in 1842. Rendered in crisp profile against a soft, painterly sky and calm Atlantic swells, Cameron’s portrait captures the stately elegance of early American steam navigation. The Kennebec, identified in bold red lettering on her paddle box, is shown under partial sail with twin smokestacks active - suggesting both the hybrid nature of early steam propulsion and the vessel’s readiness for sea. Flying period flags, including a U.S. ensign and company pennants, she presents as a proud representative of the Sanford Steamship Line, for whom she plied the route between Boston, Bangor, and the summer resorts of Maine. Her design, with a wood hull, 230-foot length, and distinctive “hogging truss,” speaks to mid-19th century innovation tailored to coastwise packets. Cameron’s style is reminiscent of 19th-century ship portraiture yet refined with contemporary technical precision. This is an excellent example of his work. 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...
Canvas, Oil
$8,400
H 28.125 in W 32.375 in D 2.375 in
Pathway to the San Gabrielino Trail; Neglected and Protected
By Tim Solliday
Located in Pasadena, CA
Provenance Acquired by the gallery directly from the artist Painted en plein air in the San Gabriel Mountains near the artist's home in the early summer of 2013. Signed "T. Solliday...
Canvas, Oil
Venetian Scene
By Henry Pember Smith
Located in New York, NY
In the 1880’s Smith made a trip to Italy, which added a whole new dimension to his work. His tight style was highly suited to the depiction of the majestic architecture and complex c...
Oil, Canvas
North Atlantic Coast
Located in Sheffield, MA
Charles Bridgeman Vickery American, 1913-1998 North Atlantic Coast Oil on canvas 24 ¼ by 30 in, w/ frame 33 by 39 in Signed lower left Inventory Number: 01650 Charles Vickery, kno...
Canvas, Oil
Storm Gust
Located in Greenwich, CT
North Carolina native Jack Saylor received his degree in Art from Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. Upon graduating he moved to Spain, then Italy w...
Canvas, Oil
$16,550
H 27.5 in W 35 in
"Vrnik, Croatia" bright colorful plein air oil painting of island sea in Croatia
By Marc Dalessio
Located in Sag Harbor, NY
"Vrnik, Croatia" is a rich and colorful plein-air oil painting of the Vrnik island in Croatia. Dalessio captures the glowing shallow waters as it reaches the rocky shoreline, beneath...
Canvas, Oil
$7,000
H 17.5 in W 23.25 in
"Factory on the River" Modernist and Precisionist WPA Industrial New York Scene
By William Sharp
Located in New York, NY
William Sharp (1900 - 1961) Factory on the River Oil on canvas 17 1/2 x 23 1/4 inches Initialed lower right: WS Provenance: Estate of the artist Private Collection, New York Swann Auction Galleries, American Art, June 13, 2019, Lot 178 William Sharp was born on June 13, 1900, in Lemberg, Austria, where he attended college and the Academy for Arts and Industry. He later studied in Kraków, Poland, and in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Sharp began his career as a designer of stained-glass windows and as a painter of murals. He served in the German army during World War I. After the war he became a newspaper artist in Berlin and a well-known etcher. Sharp drew political cartoons that were bitterly critical of the growing Nazi movement. As the influence of National Socialism intensified, he began to contribute drawings, under a pseudonym, to publications that were hostile to Hitler. After Hitler assumed power, Sharp was confronted with these drawings and told that he would be sent to a concentration camp. However, in 1934, he escaped to the United States. His first newspaper assignment in America was making courtroom sketches for The New York Mirror...
Canvas, Paint, Oil
Williamstown Landscape
Located in Sheffield, MA
Charles Foster American, 1850-1931 Cloudy Sky Over Pasture Oil on canvas 14 by 22 in, w/ frame 23 ½ by 31 ½ in Signed lower right, dated 1890 Inventory Number: 01900 Charles Foste...
Canvas, Oil
"Morning on Buck Run Bend"
By Peter Sculthorpe
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork. Signed lower right. Complemented by a hand carved and gilt frame. Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1948) Peter Sculthorpe was born in O...
Canvas, Oil
Way to the Water
By Frank Corso
Located in Greenwich, CT
Frank Corso was born in Syracuse, New York. Taking a keen interest in art at a very early age, he was inspired to draw and paint the landscape of the Finger Lakes region of Upstate N...
Canvas, Oil
$12,000
H 30 in W 40 in
"Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts, " Ernest Fiene, WPA, Boat on Beach
By Ernest Fiene
Located in New York, NY
Ernest Fiene (1894 - 1965) Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches Signed lower right 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 Paris 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. He was the subject of the first monograph for the Younger Artists Series 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. From 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 from this trip were featured in an exhibition held at the First National Bank in Pittsburgh in October of 1937 by the Pittsburgh Commission for Industrial Expansion. Fiene said of these works that he formed rhythm, opportunity for space and color, and integrity in the Pennsylvania mill and furnace paintings. Fiene received the silver medal for one of the Pittsburgh paintings...
Canvas, Oil
$8,500
H 22.5 in W 26.5 in
"Hialeah Park Race Track, Florida" Beatrix Sherman, American, Mid 20th Century
Located in New York, NY
Beatrix Sherman Hialeah Park Race Track, Florida, 1947 Signed lower right Oil on canvasboard 16 x 20 inches Beatrix Sherman (1894-1975), who changed her first name from Beatrice by...
Canvas, Oil, Board