Jim Woodson Art

Farmhands working in a field on a hot summer's day. Building on iconic depictions of farmworkers by Millet, Huys sought to imbue his figures with a sensitivity and reverence that ...

Signed Lower Right Cyprien-Eugène Boulet (1877 - 1927)

signed lower right

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by: Edward Willis Redfield (1869 - 1965) Edward W. Redfield was born in Bridgeville, Delaware, moving to Philadelphia as a young child. Determined to be an artist from an early age, he studied at the Spring Garden Institute and the Franklin Institute before entering the Pennsylvania Academy from 1887 to 1889, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, James Kelly, and Thomas Hovenden. Along with his friend and fellow artist, Robert Henri, he traveled abroad in 1889 and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris under William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. While in France, Redfield met Elise Deligant, the daughter of an innkeeper, and married in London in 1893. Upon his return to the United States, Redfield and his wife settled in Glenside, Pennsylvania. He remained there until 1898, at which time he moved his family to Center Bridge, a town several miles north of New Hope along the Delaware River. Redfield painted prolifically in the 1890s but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that he would develop the bold impressionist style that defined his career. As Redfield’s international reputation spread, many young artists gravitated to New Hope as he was a great inspiration and an iconic role model. Edward Redfield remained in Center Bridge throughout his long life, fathering his six children there. Around 1905 and 1906, Redfield’s style was coming into its own, employing thick vigorous brush strokes tightly woven and layered with a multitude of colors. These large plein-air canvases define the essence of Pennsylvania Impressionism. By 1907, Redfield had perfected his craft and, from this point forward, was creating some of his finest work. Redfield would once again return to France where he painted a small but important body of work between 1907 and 1908. While there, he received an Honorable Mention from the Paris Salon for one of these canvases. In 1910 he was awarded a Gold Medal at the prestigious Buenos Aires Exposition and at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, an entire gallery was dedicated for twenty-one of his paintings. Since Redfield painted for Exhibition with the intent to win medals, his best effort often went into his larger paintings. Although he also painted many fine smaller pictures, virtually all of his works were of major award-winning canvas sizes of 38x50 or 50x56 inches. If one were to assign a period of Redfield’s work that was representative of his “best period”, it would have to be from 1907 to 1925. Although he was capable of creating masterpieces though the late 1940s, his style fully matured by 1907 and most work from then through the early twenties was of consistently high quality. In the later 1920s and through the 1930s and 1940s, he was like most other great artists, creating some paintings that were superb examples and others that were of more ordinary quality. Redfield earned an international reputation at a young age, known for accurately recording nature with his canvases and painting virtually all of his work outdoors; Redfield was one of a rare breed. He was regarded as the pioneer of impressionist winter landscape painting in America, having few if any equals. Redfield spent summers in Maine, first at Boothbay Harbor and beginning in the 1920s, on Monhegan Island. There he painted colorful marine and coastal scenes as well as the island’s landscape and fishing shacks. He remained active painting and making Windsor style furniture...

Signed lower right. Complemented by a hand carved and gilt frame. Exhibited at the National Academy of Design, 1928

Signed lower right. Complemented by a period frame. William L. Lathrop (1859-1938) Deemed “Father of the New Hope Art Colony”, William Langson Lathrop was born in Warren, Illinois. He was largely self-taught, having only studied briefly with William Merritt Chase in 1887, at the Art Students League. Lathrop first moved east in the early 1880s, and took a job at the Photoengraving Company in New York City. While there, he befriended a fellow employee, Henry B. Snell. The two men became lifelong friends and ultimately, both would be considered central figures among the New Hope Art Colony. Lathrop's early years as an artist were ones of continuing struggle. His efforts to break through in the New York art scene seemed futile, so he scraped enough money together to travel to Europe with Henry Snell in1888. There he met and married an English girl, Annie Burt. Upon returning to New York, he tried his hand at etching, making tools from old saw blades...

Ashley John is proud to offer this artwork by: John Fabian Carlson (1874/75 - 1945) John F. Carlson was one of the leading American landscape p...

It is infrequent, to say the least, that a diagnosis of tuberculosis proves fortuitous, but that was the event, in 1921, that set Paul Starrett Sample on the road to becoming a professional artist. (The best source for an overview of Sample’s life and oeuvre remains Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene, exhib. cat., [Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, 1988] with a detailed and definitive chronology by Sample scholar, Paula F. Glick, and an essay by Robert L. McGrath. It is the source for this essay unless otherwise indicated.) Sample, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896 to a construction engineer and his wife, spent his childhood moving with his family to the various locations that his father’s work took them. By 1911, the family had landed in Glencoe, Illinois, settling long enough for Paul to graduate from New Trier High School in 1916. Sample enrolled at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where his interests were anything but academic. His enthusiasms included the football and basketball teams, boxing, pledging at a fraternity, and learning to play the saxophone. After the United States entered World War I, Sample, to his family’s dismay, signed on for the Naval Reserve, leading directly to a hiatus from Dartmouth. In 1918 and 1919, Sample served in the U.S. Merchant Marine where he earned a third mate’s license and seriously contemplated life as a sailor. Acceding to parental pressure, he returned to Dartmouth, graduating in 1921. Sample’s undergraduate life revolved around sports and a jazz band he formed with his brother, Donald, two years younger and also a Dartmouth student. In November 1933, Sample summarized his life in a letter he wrote introducing himself to Frederick Newlin Price, founder of Ferargil Galleries, who would become his New York art dealer. The artist characterized his undergraduate years as spent “wasting my time intensively.” He told Price that that “I took an art appreciation course and slept thru it every day” (Ferargil Galleries Records, circa 1900–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available on line). In 1920, Donald Sample contracted tuberculosis. He went for treatment to the world-famous Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for the prescribed regimen of rest, healthful food, and fresh air. Visiting his brother in 1921, Paul also contracted the disease. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, and had no certain cure before the development of streptomycin in 1946. Even for patients who appeared to have recovered, there was a significant rate of recurrence. Thus, in his letter to Price, Sample avoided the stigma conjured by naming the disease, but wrote “I had a relapse with a bad lung and spent the next four years hospitalized in Saranac Lake.” The stringent physical restrictions imposed by adherence to “the cure” required Sample to cultivate an alternate set of interests. He read voraciously and, at the suggestion of his physician, contacted the husband of a fellow patient for instruction in art. That artist, then living in Saranac, was Jonas Lie (1880–1940), a prominent Norwegian-American painter and an associate academician at the National Academy of Design. Lie had gained renown for his dramatic 1913 series of paintings documenting the construction of the Panama Canal (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; United States Military Academy, West Point, New York). Primarily a landscape artist, Lie had a particular affinity for scenes with water. His paintings, impressionistic, atmospheric, and brushy, never strayed from a realistic rendering of his subject. Sample regarded Lie as a mentor and retained a lifelong reverence for his teacher. Sample’s early paintings very much reflect Lie’s influence. ` In 1925, “cured,” Sample left Saranac Lake for what proved to be a brief stay in New York City, where his veteran’s benefits financed a commercial art course. The family, however, had moved to California, in the futile hope that the climate would benefit Donald. Sample joined them and after Donald’s death, remained in California, taking classes at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In Sample’s account to Price, “I couldn’t stomach the practice of painting a lot of High Sierras and desert flowers which seemed to be the only kind of pictures that were sold here so I got a job teaching drawing and painting at the art school of the University of Southern California.” Initially hired as a part-time instructor, Sample progressed to full-time status and ultimately, by the mid-1930s, to the post of Chairman of the Fine Art Department. Sample, however, did not want to wind up as a professor. “Teaching is all right in small doses,” he wrote, “but I have a horror of drifting into being a college professor and nothing more.” At the same time as he taught, Sample began to exhibit his work in a variety of venues at first locally, then nationally. Though he confessed himself “a terrible salesman,” and though occupied with continued learning and teaching, Sample was nonetheless, ambitious. In 1927, he wrote in his diary, “I am eventually going to be a painter and a damned good one. And what is more, I am going to make money at it” (as quoted by Glick, p. 15). In 1928, Sample felt sufficiently solvent to marry his long-time love, Sylvia Howland, who had also been a patient at Saranac Lake. The Howland family were rooted New Englanders and in summertime the Samples regularly traveled East for family reunion vacations. While the 1930s brought serious hardship to many artists, for Paul Sample it was a decade of success. Buttressed by the financial safety net of his teacher’s salary, he painted realist depictions of the American scene. While his work addressed depression-era conditions with a sympathetic eye, Sample avoided the anger and tinge of bitterness that characterized much contemporary realist art. Beginning in 1930, Sample began to exhibit regularly in juried exhibitions at important national venues, garnering prizes along the way. In 1930, Inner Harbor won an honorable mention in the Annual Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year Sample was also represented in a show at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and at the Biennial Exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1931, Dairy Ranch won the second Hallgarten Prize at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York. Sample also made his first appearances at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1936, Miner’s Resting won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Always interested in watercolor, in 1936, Sample began to send works on paper to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York. While participating in juried exhibitions, Sample also cultivated commercial possibilities. His first New York art dealer was the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York, which included his work in a November 1931 exhibition. In 1934, Sample joined the Ferargil Galleries in New York, after Fred Price arranged the sale of Sample’s Church Supper to the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1937, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Sample’s Janitor’s Holiday from the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, a notable honor. As prestigious as this exhibition schedule may have been, by far Sample’s most visible presence in the 1930s and 1940s was the result of his relationship with Henry Luce’s burgeoning publishing empire, Time, Inc. Sample’s first contribution to a Luce publication appears to have been another San Pedro...

William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, where he studied for several years with local artists, including the leading portraitist there, Abel Buel Moore. In 1850, he moved to ...

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork. Signed lower right. Original Period Newcomb Macklin Frame George William Sotter (1879 - 1953) Born in Pittsburgh on September 25, 1879, Sotter began his art education with local teachers and with Henry G. Keller, who had studied in various German academies. Keller, known for his superb, atmospheric watercolors, taught at the Cleveland School of Art but Sotter studied with him in Pittsburgh. Later Sotter would exhibit between 1903 and 1937 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His works were also shown at the Corcoran Gallery (1912-23), the Carnegie International (1901-26), the National Academy of Design (1913 and 1921), and at the Art Institute of Chicago (1911-27). In 1915, Sotter exhibited four works at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where he won a silver medal. Sotter was known mainly as a stained-glass artist; his work may be seen from New York City to Salt Lake City. Around a dozen craftsmen worked under him for these commissions. Sotter spent the summer of 1902 with Pennsylvania impressionist Edward Redfield in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Between 1910 and 1919, Sotter taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His paintings often feature large areas of sky filled with clouds and he frequently painted winter night scenes, such as Moonlight, Bucks County (Beacon Hill Fine Art), a perfectly successful depiction of a quiet, moonlit landscape filled with twinkling stars. Star-studded skies, although rare in landscape painting, go back at least to 1600 when they appear in the oeuvre of Adam Elsheimer...

The career of William Stanley Haseltine spans the entire second half of the nineteenth century. During these years he witnessed the growth and decline of American landscape painting, the new concept of plein-air painting practiced by the Barbizon artists, and the revolutionary techniques of the French Impressionists, all of which had profound effects on the development of painting in the western world. Haseltine remained open to these new developments, selecting aspects of each and assimilating them into his work. What remained constant was his love of nature and his skill at rendering exactly what he saw. His views, at once precise and poetic, are, in effect, portraits of the many places he visited and the landscapes he loved. Haseltine was born in Philadelphia, the son of a prosperous businessman. In 1850, at the age of fifteen, he began his art studies with Paul Weber, a German artist who had settled in Philadelphia two years earlier. From Weber, Haseltine learned about Romanticism and the meticulous draftsmanship that characterized the German School. At the same time, Haseltine enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, and took sketching trips around the Pennsylvania countryside, exploring areas along the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers. Following his sophomore year, Haseltine transferred to Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1854, Haseltine returned to Philadelphia and resumed his studies with Weber. Although Weber encouraged Haseltine to continue his training in Europe, the elder Haseltine was reluctant to encourage his son to pursue a career as an artist. During the next year, Haseltine took various sketching trips along the Hudson River and produced a number of pictures, some of which were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the spring of 1855. Ultimately, having convinced his father that he should be allowed to study in Europe, Haseltine accompanied Weber to Düsseldorf. The Düsseldorf Academy was, during the 1850s, at the peak of its popularity among American artists. The Academy’s strict course of study emphasized the importance of accurate draftsmanship and a strong sense of professionalism. Landscape painting was the dominant department at the Düsseldorf Academy during this period, and the most famous landscape painter there was Andreas Achenbach, under whom Haseltine studied. Achenbach’s realistic style stressed close observation of form and detail, and reinforced much of what Haseltine had already learned. His Düsseldorf training remained an important influence on him for the rest of his life. At Düsseldorf, Haseltine became friendly with other American artists studying there, especially Emanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, and Albert Bierstadt. They were constant companions, and in the spring and summer months took sketching trips together. In the summer of 1856 the group took a tour of the Rhine, Ahr, and Nahe valleys, continuing through the Swiss alps and over the Saint Gotthard Pass into northern Italy. The following summer Haseltine, Whittredge, and the painter John Irving returned to Switzerland and Italy, and this time continued on to Rome. Rome was a fertile ground for artists at mid-century. When Haseltine arrived in the fall of 1857, the American sculptors Harriet Hosmer, Chauncey B. Ives, Joseph Mozier, William Henry Rinehart...

SAPERE AUDE. Dare to be wise. Immanuel Kant’s directive is embodied in the work of David Ligare. For thirty-five years, Ligare has dedicated his work to ...