David Rathman Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

A charming and stylized depiction of a day at the Central Park Zoo. with World War Two uniformed visitors front and center. Sea lions put on a show in front of a packed audience. The...

If people don't swat you . . . then something else happens." Illustration for Blechman's popular book Franklin the Fly (Mankato, MN: Creative Editions, 2007). Watercolor, pen and ink...

A delightful composition by this master watercolourist. William Payne (1760-1830) Figures and cattle by a river Watercolour 7¾ inches, circular, unframed 15 x 14½ inches with the fr...

Boulevard. 1961, paper, watercolor, 37x52 cm Laimdonis Grasmanis (1916-1970) 1933 – 1937 – Art school of Applied art in Liepaja 1937 – 1942 – Art Academy of Latvia Artist took pa...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943 Watercolor on paper Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

The Hunting Party Attributed to Dirk Maes (1659-1717) Dutch. Figures in a Classical Landscape, Watercolour and wash on paper, Mounted, unframed image 6.75" x 9.75" (17.1 x 24.7cm)...

Landscape is a beautiful drawing in ink and watercolor on paper realized by the Russian artist Angelina Beloff (1879 - 1969) Good conditions except fo...

Frank Duffield (British, 1908-1982) original gouache painting on board, unframed size: 13 x 12.75 inches condition: overall very good, minor wear to the edges as is normal for an unf...

Ink wash with watercolor in sepia and black, and blue, on buff wove watercolor paper, 14 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches (360 x 260 mm). 1/4" of the lower right corner is lost, minor crack (doe...

A really charming view of figures on a street by an Lake Como James T Herve D'Egville (1806-1880) Figures on hilly street with lake Como beyond Signed Watercolour 8 x 5¼ inches with...

French Landscape by Bernard Labbe (French mid 20th century) original gouache on paper size: 12 x 14 inches condition: very good and ready to be enjoyed provenance: the artists ateli...

The Market is a colored artwork realized by Atelier Bernard Lelong during the 1980s. Mixed colored watercolor on paper. The artwork represents a land...