Rudy Nappi Paintings

The Menthol Mood, 2009, Nancy Lamb, Oil on canvas, 48 x 85" Nancy Lamb (American, born 1956), sculptor and painter. Formally trained at Texas Christian Un...

Provenance: Torres Family Collection, Asunción, Paraguay, ca. 1967-2017 While the genre of portraiture flourished in the New World, very few examples of early Spanish colonial portraits have survived to the present day. This remarkable painting is a rare example of female portraiture, depicting a member of the highest echelons of society in Cuzco during the last quarter of the 17th century. Its most distinctive feature is the false beauty mark (called a chiqueador) that the sitter wears on her left temple. Chiqueadores served both a cosmetic and medicinal function. In addition to beautifying their wearers, these silk or velvet pouches often contained medicinal herbs thought to cure headaches. This painting depicts an unidentified lady from the Creole elite in Cuzco. Her formal posture and black costume are both typical of the established conventions of period portraiture and in line with the severe fashion of the Spanish court under the reign of Charles II, which remained current until the 18th century. She is shown in three-quarter profile, her long braids tied with soft pink bows and decorated with quatrefoil flowers, likely made of silver. Her facial features are idealized and rendered with great subtly, particularly in the rosy cheeks. While this portrait lacks the conventional coat of arms or cartouche that identifies the sitter, her high status is made clear by the wealth of jewels and luxury materials present in the painting. She is placed in an interior, set off against the red velvet curtain tied in the middle with a knot on her right, and the table covered with gold-trimmed red velvet cloth at the left. The sitter wears a four-tier pearl necklace with a knot in the center with matching three-tiered pearl bracelets and a cross-shaped earing with three increasingly large pearls. She also has several gold and silver rings on both hands—one holds a pair of silver gloves with red lining and the other is posed on a golden metal box, possibly a jewelry box. The materials of her costume are also of the highest quality, particularly the white lace trim of her wide neckline and circular cuffs. The historical moment in which this painting was produced was particularly rich in commissions of this kind. Following his arrival in Cuzco from Spain in the early 1670’s, bishop Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo actively promoted the emergence of a distinctive regional school of painting in the city. Additionally, with the increase of wealth and economic prosperity in the New World, portraits quickly became a way for the growing elite class to celebrate their place in society and to preserve their memory. Portraits like this one would have been prominently displayed in a family’s home, perhaps in a dynastic portrait gallery. We are grateful to Professor Luis Eduardo Wuffarden for his assistance cataloguing this painting on the basis of high-resolution images. He has written that “the sober palette of the canvas, the quality of the pigments, the degree of aging, and the craquelure pattern on the painting layer confirm it to be an authentic and representative work of the Cuzco school of painting...

This delightful turn of the century (early 20th century) oil on canvas painting represents an Italian landscape with one of the most famous squares in the world: Piazza San Marco in ...

This work is part of our exhibition - America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1940s Army Poker, c. 1943, probably tempera on board, signed upper right, 16 x 20 inches, inscribed verso a) “Army Poker / Mervin Honig / 421 W 42 St. N.Y.C.,” b) “Mervin Honig / US Army Air Force – Seymour Johnson Field – Goldsboro, NC / Circa 1943,” and c) “(This painting was done before men was (sic) shipped off to the Mariana Islands (Saipan) The Second World War.” Note: four pencil sketches for this work included Mervin Honig was a New York-based painter and illustrator who is best known for his realistic depictions of everyday life and sports themes. Honig was raised in Brooklyn and recalled almost never being without a paintbox in hand from the time he started elementary school. Honig had a deep reverence for the Old Master painters, Vermeer and Bellini, as well as the Americans Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. He initially studied art from 1939 through 1941 with Francis Criss. At the outbreak of World War II, Honig worked as a mechanic for Republic Aviation, but in August 1942, he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and was stationed at Seymour Johnson Field in Goldsboro, North Carolina. During the war, Honig began to exhibit nationally, including as part of the Portrait of America exhibitions which originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveled around the country, as well as at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He painted Army Poker in 1943 while stationed at Johnson Field. In this work, Honig draws inspiration from Paul Cezanne's The Card Players (Metropolitan Museum of Art), with a similar placement of the four figures, but Cezanne's table is replaced with an Army cot, the pipe rack with a soldier's mess kit and the drapery in the right background with a heap of discarded uniforms. Unlike the vibrancy of Cezanne's composition, the limited palette of Honig's work suggests the drabness and monotony of stateside Army life. After being discharged from military service, Honig furthered his studies with Amadee Ozenfant in 1946 and Hans Hoffman from 1947 through 1950. Additional exhibitions included the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Provincetown Art Association, and the National Academies Galleries of the Allied Artists Association. He was represented by the venerable Frank Rehn...

Provenance: Private Collection, New York, until 2022. Martín de Porres was born in Lima in 1579, the illegitimate son of a Spanish-American father, J...

Signed "Martha Cahoon" lower right. Provenance: private collection, Palm Beach Florida About this artist: Born of Swedish immigrant parents in 1905, in Rosindale, Massachusetts, Martha Farham Cahoon had a highly successful business partnership with her husband Ralph Cahoon...

Provenance: Suida-Manning Collection, New York Private Collection Exhibited: Venetian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century, Finch College Museum of Art, New York, October 30-December 15, 1963, no. 31. Veronese & His Studio in North American Collections, Birmingham Museum of Art, Oct. 1-Nov. 15, 1972, and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Dec. 5-Dec. 31, 1972 Literature: Robert L. Manning, A Loan Exhibition of Venetian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century, exh. cat. New York 1963, cat. no. 31ill., as by Veronese Stephen Clayton and Edward Weeks, eds., introduction by David Rosand, Veronese & His Studio in North American Collections, Birmingham 1972, as by Veronese, p. 38 ill. Terisio Pignatti, Veronese, Venice 1976, I, p. 199, cat. no. A225, II, fig. 908, as attributed to Veronese Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese; catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence 1991, no. 54°, as attributed to Veronese. Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese, Milan 1995, II, pp. 517-518ill., cat. no. A 56, under attributed paintings, by Veronese and workshop) John Garton, Grace and Grandeur; The Portraiture of Paolo Veronese, London-Turnhout 2008, p. 237, fig. 77, cat. no. R16, as workshop of Veronese. Scarsellino’s art is widely regarded as critical link between the Renaissance and the Baroque styles in Emilian painting; not only was he an important transmitter of the heritage of the Renaissance, but he was also open to innovative ideas, and was one of the earliest to experiment with the trend to naturalism that would become fundamental to art of the new century. Born around 1550, he received his earliest training from his father Sigismondo, an architect and painter; it was probably while working at his father’s side as a youth that he acquired the nickname Scarsellino, or “little Scarsella”. After absorbing the principles of his art in Ferrara and Parma, he went to Venice in 1570, staying for four years and working in the shop of Veronese. In the following decade, his art —especially in terms of its piety and its development of landscape— demonstrates a strong sympathy with that of the Carracci, with whom he worked in 1592-1593 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Maria Angela Novelli and later Alessandra Frabetti both propose that Scarsellino traveled to Rome, although such a trip has not been documented; if he did travel to Rome, it probably would have occurred during the years that Scarsellino’s colleagues Agostino and Annibale Carracci were there, that is, beginning in 1595 and until 1609. The last decades of Scarsellino’s career again involve stylistic experimentation, this time in a manner that would bring his work very close to the progressive figurative naturalism of Carlo Bononi and prepare the way for Guercino. The present portrait of a distinguished gentleman had been long thought to be by Paolo Veronese and was in fact attributed to him by such distinguished connoisseurs as Adolfo Venturi and Wilhelm Suida. The portrait’s style is, however, distinct from Veronese’s, although clearly indebted to it, and the attribution to the young Scarsellino is wholly convincing. The painting would then date from the 1570s – a date confirmed by the costume the subject wears. The puffed hat that appears in the painting had a rather short-lived vogue in the early 1570s. One sees it in Giambattista Moroni’s Portrait of Count...

Appointed Portrait Painter to the Prince of Wales in Scotland in 1785, David Martin was the leading Scottish portrait painter of his generation. The artist is best known in the United States for his portrait of Benjamin Franklin, which is in the White House collection, Washington, D.C. The sitters depicted in this double portrait were the sons of the British diplomat Edward Finch-Hatton. George (1747-1823), later of Eastwell Park, Kent, is shown seated, reading an ancient charter or medieval manuscript...

Erasmus Quellinus The Continence of Scipio Oil on Canvas The painting is included in the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist. The Roman commande...

AN URGENT MAN 2020 Paris, France Oil and acrylic on canvas portray a ‘derbyed’ man attempting to shed the weighted armor of his obligations and persona. A very loose nod to the char...

Ralph Reuben/Ruben Stubbs (English, 1824-1879) Low Tide at Sunset • 19thC Oil on artist board (card) ca. 21 x 36.5 cm • Signed bottom right and verso Biografie: Stubbs Ralph Reu...

Ljuba Petrović (Serbian, 1928) Busy Winter Landscape • Oil on artist board / thick card • Alluminium frame ca. 35 x 77 cm • Visible image ca. 20.5 x 62.5 cm • Signed and dated lower right (19)73 • Good, untouched original condition Ljuba Petrović is a Serbian painter born in 1928 in Nis, ex Yugoslavia / now Serbia. Originally an agricultural worker, he later worked as a painter decorator and served as a town hall official in his native Nis. He went on to create frescos, wall paintings and small paintings, which after joining local exhibitions, he exhibited in 1973 in Geneva, Switzerland and in the eighties successfully in Paris, at the Salon International d'Art Naïf. Petrović is a typical representative of the Yugoslave naïve school of painting...