Virginia Blight Paintings

This framed 19.875" x 16" oil painting on canvas by Oklahoma-based artist James Cobb depicts a strand of river birch trees in freshly fallen snow. at the he...

"Figures, Boats, and House - Cape May Point, NJ" is a Pennsylvania Beach Scene by American Impressionist painter Albert Van Nesse Greene. The ...

Anthony Thieme (1888 - 1954) Other Side of Town (Leading to Pigeon Cove) Oil on canvas 30 x 36 inches Signed lower left Provenance: David H. Hall Fine Art, Dover, Massachusetts Vose Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts Private Collection, New Jersey Anthony Thieme was born in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam in 1888. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, at the Royal Academy at the Hague, as an apprentice to George Hoecker, a well known stage designer in Düsseldorf, Germany, and to Antonio Mancini, an Italian Impressionist. After completing his studies, Thieme journeyed throughout Europe and South America, working in stage design to support his travels. Thieme first came to the United States in 1917 and initially worked as a set designer and book illustrator first in New York and later in Boston. By the late 1920s, Thieme had married and moved from Boston to Cape Ann in Rockport, Massachusetts, an emerging art colony. Like the other Rockport artists...

A very attractive California Impressionist oil on canvas painting by Charles L. A. Smith, "California Highlands", dated 1930. This very attractive large painting by one of the foremo...

George Gardner Symons (1863 - 1930) Winter Scene Oil on canvas 20 x 25 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Private Collection, St. Louis, Missouri William A. Karges Fine Art Gallery, Carmel, California Private Collection, Washington A landscape and marine artist, George Symons was one of America's more noted plein-air painters who combined styles of impressionism and realism. His works are cited for their energy and simplicity, and he often did panoramic views. He was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1861, with the name of George Gardner Simon, but he changed his last name to Symons when he returned from study in England because of concern about anti-semitism. Not much is known about his early life. He first studied at the Chicago Art Institute where he became a close, life-long friend of William Wendt. They painted together in California and then in Cornwall, England in 1898. He also studied in Paris, and Munich and London, and joining a colony of artists at St. Ives, adopted the plein-air techniques of Julius Olsson, Adrian Stokes, and Rudolph Hellwag. He worked in Chicago as a commercial artist, and about 1903 returned to California with Wendt and built a studio in Laguna Beach and became active in western art societies including the California Art Club. He returned often, but maintained his primary studio...

Eugène Laurent Vail (1857 - 1934) Soir de Novembre, Dordrecht Oil on canvas 19 1/4 x 25 3/4 inches Signed lower left; titled in two places on the stretcher with various other inscriptions, stamped "MADAME G:VAIL A" and inscribed "177" in ink and "#43" in pencil on a partial label from Garde-Meuble Maple affixed to the stretcher Eugene Vail (Saint-Servan, France September 29, 1857 - Paris, December 28, 1934), the son of a French mother and an American father, Lawrence Eugene Vail, studied at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey (where Alfred Stieglitz was born in 1864) and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1877. Then he became a student of William Merritt Chase and J. Carroll Beckwith at the Art Students League before returning to France. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1882 where he was instructed by Alexandre Cabanel, Raphaël Collin, and Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929), known as an extreme naturalist. When Bastien-Lepage died in 1884, Dagnan-Bouveret became the leader of the Naturalist School. He definitely made an indelible impression on Vail. According to Louise Cann, Vail soon became an independent painter working at Pont-Aven and Concarneau. It is difficult to determine when he separated from his teachers since he is listed as a student whenever he exhibited at the Paris Salon — that is, until 1899 when he dropped the mention of élève. A picture of a peasant girl, Seulette was his Salon debut painting in 1883, the same year that he sent two scenes of Brittany to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' exhibition, which documents his stay in that region. The next year he exhibited in the Salon: Fishing Port, Concarneau, which went to the Luxembourg Museum (it is now in the Musée Municipal of Brest). It has the Naturalist brown and gray palette and tonalist atmosphere but already shows that Vail had direct experience with scenes of life in coastal villages: "So convincing was his familiarity with the French coast that the critic Thiébault-Sisson claimed him as a Frenchman and declared that no American marine painter could touch his skill." (Maureen C. O'Brien, in Blaugrund, 1989, p. 218). In 1885, Vail exhibited Inner Port at Dieppe and in the following year On the Thames (Private collection), which later won him the Grand Diploma of Honor from an international jury in Berlin in 1891. Widow, the title of Vail's entry in the Salon of 1887 (unlocated), is a striking image of a woman standing on a beach, looking out to the expanse of the ocean where her husband obviously met his end. The innocent child who looks at us may have the same fate in store for him. Then in 1888, Vail completed his masterpiece, Ready, About! a "wall-size" 94 x 125½ inch canvas. The painting won a first-class gold medal in the Salon of 1888, then at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, Vail won another gold medal. The first precedent that comes to mind is Théodore Géricault's colossal Raft of the Medusa of 1819 (Louvre), the celebrated romantic image of castaways about to be rescued after being lost at sea. But while Géricault presents a massive, sculpturesque group of figures struggling on a raft just beyond our designated viewing space, Vail pulls the viewer into the picture, or more exactly, extends the diagonally rocking boat into the spectator's area, vividly anticipating the effects of cinematography. There is no more effective way to engage the spectator's attention and sympathies, and the illusionism is especially effective in this life-size picture. Vail's vigorous brushwork — a uniform use of rectangular strokes — adds to the motion-filled, dynamic actuality of this image, and the overall green-gray tonalities evoke the constantly menacing, cold and wet travails in the life of the fishermen in the Atlantic's rough waters. Theodore Child (1889, p. 518) wrote about this painting: "very beautiful in color, and amongst the very strongest and best pictures of this kind in the Exhibition." Dordrecht (unlocated) was Vail's painting exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1892, and in the following year he showed Fisherman — The North Sea at the Paris Salon, the same year in which he re-exhibited Dordrecht and On the Thames at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Vail won the coveted Légion d'Honneur in 1894. Some of his paintings found their way to European museums, for example, Soir de novembre (Odessa Museum) and Soir de Bretagne (Museo d'Arte Moderna, Venice). The latter was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. Also there was Voix de la mer (Voices of the Sea), which we identify as the painting that appears in an interior view of the American section, just to the right of a doorway (fig. 20 in Fischer, 1999), a simple marine painting. Some time after 1900, Vail turned to both impressionism and post-impressionism but no one seems to have charted this course. His Autumn near Beauvais, illustrated in International Studio (1902, p. 211), The Flags, St. Mark's Venice (1903; National Gallery of Art), and Grand Canal, Venice, ca. 1904 (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design) demonstrate an impressionist technique with broken color. Mandel (1977, p. 202) wrote on the latter: "applied in short strokes juxtaposing brilliant hues of orange, blue, white, black and red, with a strong interplay between the warm pink tones of the walls and the green shadows of the black boats which are silhouetted against them." Cann (1937) believed that in Venice, Vail "found his true self." The Flags forecasts the Armistice Day pictures by Hassam and others, painted fifteen years later. Vail became involved in the Society of American Artists in Paris and the Société Internationale de Peinture et de Sculpture, whose membership included Frank Brangwyn, Charles Cottet (1863-1924), the famous Naturalist sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831-1905), Frits Thaulow...

The painting is signed lower right. It depicts wisteria blooming brightly above a white courtyard entrance.

William Lester Stevens Rockport Signed lower right Oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches Born on June 15, 1888, in Rockport, Massachusetts, Stevens displayed his artistic abilities from a y...

Wilson Irvine French Landscape, circa 1908 Signed lower right Oil on canvas 29 x 36 inches A prolific Impressionist with a penchant for atmospheric scenes, Illinois native Wilson I...

Hayley Lever Winter in St. Ives Signed lower left Oil on canvas 8 1/2 x 11 1/4 inches Hayley Lever’s versatility has worked against his posthumous reputation. He was never associat...

Mary Butler A Quick Rest Signed lower left Oil on canvasboard 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches Provenance Private Collection, New York Born in Chester, Colorado, Mary Butler was a landscape p...

Leon Foster Jones Corner of my Garden, 1902 Signed and dated lower left Oil on canvas 26 x 25 inches Provenance Goldfield Galleries, Los Angeles, California Private Collection, Virginia Beach, Virginia Leon Foster Jones was a painter of landscapes, an etcher, a lithographer, and an educator. He was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, his father held the position of overseer in one of the hosiery mills in the Manchester area. In approximately 1901, he married Josephine Currier. During the initial years of their marriage, the couple resided in Concord, New Hampshire. They made Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York their permanent home in 1910, although the artist had begun working there as early as 1907. Numerous sources indicate that throughout his life, Jones gained recognition primarily for his paintings and etchings featuring historical sites across Long Island. His artistic education included four years at the Cowles Art School in Boston, Massachusetts, where he studied under Joseph Rodefer DeCamp...

William Baxter Closson Trail of the Snowshoes, circa 1910 Signed lower right Oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches Provenance The Cooley Gallery, Old Lyme, Connecticut Born October 13, 184...

Thomas Greenley Jr. Downstreet in Sag Harbor, 1953 Titled and dated on the reverse Oil on canvasboard 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Frederick Lester Sexton White Horse Signed lower right Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Provenance Part of a Collection received from the Lyme Art Association. Frederick Lester Sexton received a lot of reviews and exhibitions in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when he was at the height of his career. Because it captured the personal view of many people's wish to ignore national issues and simply live their lives in their homes, his work was favorably welcomed. The rise of modernist styles like Abstract Expressionism, which started to take over the American art scene in the 1950s, also contributed to Sexton's fall in popularity. As collectors and regular spectators discover once more that realism is a valid component of American art because it speaks directly and clearly to the beauty they perceive in their surroundings, many artists, like Sexton, are experiencing a renaissance. Cheshire, Connecticut, was the birthplace of Frederick Sexton in 1889. His father, J. Frederick Sexton, was the Rector of St. Peter's Church in Cheshire and a well-known Episcopal clergyman. The mother, Mary Louise Lester, was an amateur painter and came from a pretty well-known Hartford family. Frederick was killed in an open-hearth fire when he was eighteen months old. His right hand was badly burned and was never to be opened again. The father kept the family together after his mother passed away when he was nineteen. Sexton's mother taught him art, and he went to public schools in New Haven. He received the prestigious Winchester Prize for a year of study in Spain while attending the Yale School of Fine Art, where he studied under Augustus Tack...