Walter Elmer Schofield Art

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...

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) Rocky Inlet (France) Oil on canvas, relined, c. 1912 Signed: K A Buehr, lower right (see photo) Created during the artist's time in Giverny and Normandy...

"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...

Lynn Gertenbach's "Ride at Golden Hills" is a remarkable oil painting that captures a serene moment of a lady riding a horse under a tree, surrounded by lush grass and vibrant scener...

Oil Painting of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted en plein air. A sailboat sails underneath. Painted in a thick, impressionist style. Painting dimensions: 4 x 11 inches Framed dimensions: 9 x 16 inches Framed in a handmade, Italian, custom gold leaf frame. Nelson H. White was born in New London, Connecticut in 1932. White has been surrounded by art and artists from the time he was born. He received his earliest art instruction from his grandfather, Henry Cooke White (1861-1952) and his father Nelson Cooke White (1900-1989), both important American artists. The family lived in Waterford, Connecticut and the elder White had been an early member of the art colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Known for his paintings of the Connecticut landscape and shoreline, Henry Cooke White became a teacher to his son, Nelson Cooke White. Living with his parents at the Florence Griswold house in Old Lyme, he met some of the most important and influential artists of the day, Childe Hassam, Will Howe Foote and Harry Hoffman. Later, Nelson White's father began to take his family to summer on Shelter Island and became friendly with many of the artists of the Peconic colony such as Irving Wiles, an important American impressionist. After graduating from the Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts in 1951, Nelson H. White began to study at Mitchell College in Connecticut but left to pursue studies in the violin, musical theory and composition. At this time, he began to spend more time studying art with his father and grandfather. By 1955, Nelson H. White had decided to devote himself to a career as a painter and traveled to Florence, Italy to become an apprentice to Pietro Annigoni, the world-renowned Florentine master. Within two years, the young White had won two awards for his work. While in Florence he also studied with the great Italian teacher, Nerina Simi. Today, White divides his time between the United States and Florence. White is still actively involved with studies at The Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Although he has received instruction from some very important artists, White's work is highly individual. He paints with great spirit. Upon seeing his work one quickly senses White’s great love for nature and the outdoors. Through his eyes we are able to view and interpret nature in an intimate manner. Whether Nelson H. White is painting the Connecticut shore, a beach in Italy, a pond on Shelter Island or the hills of Vermont, he allows the observer to view a soft, yet dramatic side of nature. His ability to use color, coupled with rich brush work and a graduation of light, air and atmosphere allows one to enjoy a certain mood which is clearly conveyed in White's paintings. It is a mood that leaves us with a lasting impression. White has shown his work in numerous galleries across the globe since the 1950s, from the United States all the way to Italy and Russia. White's first museum restrospective was in the New Britain Museum of American Art in July 2012. His work can be found in many private and public collections, as well as several museums. Art Education 1999- present The Florence Academy of Art, Florence, Italy 1956-1987 Student of Ms. Nerina Simi, Florence Italy 1955-1980 Apprentice to Pietro Annigoni, Florence, Italy abd studied watercolor painting with Ogden Pleissner...

Karl Albert Beuhr (1866-1952) Giverny Landscape Oil on relined canvas, c. 1912 Signed lower right: K A Buehr Condition: Canvas relined for support Image size: 13 1/4 x 15 3/8 inches Frame size: 19 5/8 x 21 7/8 inches Provenance: Gift of the artist to his wife, Mary Hess Beuhr The artist's niece, daughter of Will Hess Buehr David Saltzman Robert Henry Adams Thomas French Fine Art Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Horner, Canton, Ohio Exhibited: Canton Museum of Art, Impressionism: An American View, 1983, label on verso Karl Albert Buehr at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago Exhibition dates The exhibition was held in 1994 at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 715 North Franklin Street, Chicago. Surviving provenance records describe it as the gallery’s first exhibition at its North Franklin Street location. Works documented as included include Woman on a Patio, Rocky Inlet (France), and apparently other paintings and studies acquired through David Saltzman from the family of Buehr’s wife, Mary Hess Buehr. The 1994 Karl Albert Buehr exhibition at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art represented an important act of historical recovery. Although Buehr enjoyed considerable recognition during his lifetime—as an exhibiting painter, prizewinner, and influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—his reputation had become less visible in the decades following his death. By bringing together paintings and works on paper that had descended through the artist’s family, the Adams exhibition helped restore Buehr to his proper position among the leading exponents of American Impressionism and the most important Chicago-trained painters working in France before the First World War. Giverny was crucial to Buehr’s mature development. American painters had been drawn to the Norman village since the late 1880s, attracted both by Monet’s presence and by the region’s gardens, river valleys, cultivated fields, and distinctive northern light. Buehr did not simply imitate Monet. His figure compositions remained grounded in the academic training he received in Chicago and Paris, but he enlivened that structure with broken brushwork, heightened complementary color, and an increasingly luminous palette. His characteristic compositions place elegantly dressed young women on terraces, beside windows, or within flowering gardens. These figures are neither conventional society portraits nor anonymous decorative accessories. They occupy a carefully balanced space between individual presence and pictorial harmony. Faces and gestures are often quietly observed, while dresses, parasols, flowers, foliage, and shifting sunlight become vehicles for color. Lavender shadows, rose and coral fabrics, emerald foliage, and brilliant passages of yellow or blue transform the garden into a chromatic environment surrounding the sitter. Works associated with the Adams exhibition illuminate the breadth of Buehr’s French production. The pastel Woman on a Patio, circa 1915, demonstrates his ability to translate Impressionist color into the immediacy of a dry medium. Pastel allowed him to place one hue directly beside another without losing intensity. The resulting surface possesses a soft atmospheric unity while retaining the energy of individual strokes. The work’s history—gifted by Buehr to Mary Hess Buehr and subsequently descending through her family—also gives it a particularly intimate character. Rocky Inlet (France) presents another aspect of Buehr’s practice. In place of the cultivated garden and poised female figure, the artist confronts a rugged coastal landscape. Yet his essential concern remains light acting upon color. Rock, water, and vegetation are constructed through abbreviated touches rather than continuous modeling. The small scale suggests direct observation, possibly an outdoor study made during Buehr’s travels in Normandy. Its provenance likewise begins with Mary Hess Buehr and passes through the family before reaching David Saltzman and Robert Henry Adams Fine Art. This family provenance was central to the significance of the 1994 exhibition. The works had not merely circulated anonymously through the market; many retained a direct association with the artist’s household. Such a group could include informal studies, experimental compositions, and personal gifts that Buehr elected to keep rather than send to public exhibitions. Together they offered a more private and exploratory view of his career. Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952): France and the Giverny Years Karl Albert Buehr—whose surname is sometimes misspelled “Beuhr”—was a German-born American painter and influential teacher associated with the second generation of American Impressionists working at Giverny. Although his artistic identity was rooted in Chicago, the years he spent in France transformed his palette, subject matter, and approach to painting. Born on February 14, 1866, in Feuerbach, near Stuttgart, Buehr immigrated with his family to Chicago, probably in 1881. After working briefly for a commercial lithographer, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1888. He studied with John H. Vanderpoel and graduated with honors in 1894, after which the school invited him to teach. He also served in the Illinois cavalry during the Spanish-American War and married Mary Guion Hess, one of his students and an accomplished artist in her own right. Early study in Europe Buehr’s European education unfolded in several stages. Around 1900 he settled in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian, principally under the French painter Raphaël Collin. Collin was known for idealized female figures placed in luminous outdoor settings, a combination of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist light that anticipated Buehr’s mature work. Buehr reportedly received a gold medal at the Académie in 1901. His early European paintings included portraits, landscapes, and scenes of rural labor. Visits to Holland exposed him to the restrained tonalism of the Hague School, while his travels in Italy—particularly Taormina, Sicily, during 1906 and 1907—encouraged a brighter response to Mediterranean sunlight. He also studied in London, where his contacts with Frank Brangwyn and the decorative currents of British painting strengthened his interest in broad design, rhythmic composition, and large arrangements of figures. A decisive factor in this extended European residence was the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1906 until 1913, Ward provided Buehr with a monthly stipend, enabling the artist, his wife, and their children to remain abroad and pursue their work without the immediate pressures of the American market. Buehr at Giverny Buehr entered the Anglo-American artistic community at Giverny around 1909, probably through his friendship with Henry Salem Hubbell, another American figure painter supported by Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1909 through 1912, Buehr generally spent winters in Paris and the warmer months at Giverny. In 1912 and the summer of 1913, the family reportedly lived at Sainte-Geneviève-lès-Gasny, close to Giverny. By this date Giverny was no longer merely the village in which Claude Monet lived. It had become an international artists’ colony, particularly attractive to American painters who admired Impressionist color but wished to retain firm drawing and carefully organized figure compositions. Buehr’s associates included Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard Edward Miller, Guy Rose, Lawton Parker, Louis Ritman, Edmund Greacen, Karl Anderson, and Theodore Earl Butler. Buehr was especially close to the circle of Frieseke and Miller. These artists specialized in decorative paintings of fashionably dressed women reading, sewing, taking tea, or resting in sunlit gardens. Their figures were surrounded by flowers, patterned fabrics, parasols, and flickering passages of colored light. Buehr adopted this repertoire, but his paintings usually retained a stronger structural organization and a more assertive contrast between complementary colors. During his first months at Giverny, Buehr worked on a large decorative panel of dancing figures. The composition received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1910, an important professional recognition. That summer, however, he increasingly turned toward intimate garden scenes and outdoor figure studies. The influence of Richard Miller can be detected in the decorative arrangement of the figures, while Frieseke’s example encouraged Buehr s use of brilliant sunlight, patterned surfaces, and saturated hues. Relationship with Claude Monet Claude Monet was Buehr’s artistic hero, but the extent of their personal relationship should not be overstated. Buehr’s children played with the children of Theodore Butler, Monet’s son-in-law, and they visited the Monet household. Buehr’s daughter Kathleen later recalled that Monet was gracious to the children. Nevertheless, the best available scholarship suggests that no close personal association between Buehr and Monet has been documented. Monet’s importance to Buehr was therefore primarily artistic. At Giverny, Buehr learned to regard colored light as a central subject rather than merely a means of describing objects. Shadows became violet, blue, or green; white dresses reflected the surrounding garden; and faces and arms were modeled through small strokes of warm and cool color. The enclosed garden also became a kind of outdoor studio in which human figures, flowers, fabrics, and sunlight could be orchestrated into a unified decorative design. The Giverny style Buehr became best known for paintings of young women seated or standing in gardens, often accompanied by colorful parasols. Works such as Springtime in Giverny, Under the Parasol, and related pictures of women reading or conversing exemplify his mature style. Although inspired by French Impressionism, these paintings are not spontaneous transcriptions of fleeting visual experience in the strict Monet tradition. They are carefully staged figure compositions. Buehr himself explained that the outdoor figure painter should concentrate upon the ensemble—grouping, arrangement, and color—rather than laboriously describing every feature. This principle helps distinguish his Giverny paintings...

Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952) Strolling in the Park Oil on canvas, relined, c. 1910 Unsigned Provenance: Gift of the Artist to his wife, Mary Hess Beuhr The artist's niece, daughter of Will Hess David Saltzman Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago, exhibited 1994 Karl Albert Buehr at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago Exhibition dates The exhibition was held in 1994 at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 715 North Franklin Street, Chicago. Surviving provenance records describe it as the gallery’s first exhibition at its North Franklin Street location. Works documented as included include Woman on a Patio, Rocky Inlet (France), and apparently other paintings and studies acquired through David Saltzman from the family of Buehr’s wife, Mary Hess Buehr. The 1994 Karl Albert Buehr exhibition at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art represented an important act of historical recovery. Although Buehr enjoyed considerable recognition during his lifetime—as an exhibiting painter, prizewinner, and influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—his reputation had become less visible in the decades following his death. By bringing together paintings and works on paper that had descended through the artist’s family, the Adams exhibition helped restore Buehr to his proper position among the leading exponents of American Impressionism and the most important Chicago-trained painters working in France before the First World War. Giverny was crucial to Buehr’s mature development. American painters had been drawn to the Norman village since the late 1880s, attracted both by Monet’s presence and by the region’s gardens, river valleys, cultivated fields, and distinctive northern light. Buehr did not simply imitate Monet. His figure compositions remained grounded in the academic training he received in Chicago and Paris, but he enlivened that structure with broken brushwork, heightened complementary color, and an increasingly luminous palette. His characteristic compositions place elegantly dressed young women on terraces, beside windows, or within flowering gardens. These figures are neither conventional society portraits nor anonymous decorative accessories. They occupy a carefully balanced space between individual presence and pictorial harmony. Faces and gestures are often quietly observed, while dresses, parasols, flowers, foliage, and shifting sunlight become vehicles for color. Lavender shadows, rose and coral fabrics, emerald foliage, and brilliant passages of yellow or blue transform the garden into a chromatic environment surrounding the sitter. Works associated with the Adams exhibition illuminate the breadth of Buehr’s French production. The pastel Woman on a Patio, circa 1915, demonstrates his ability to translate Impressionist color into the immediacy of a dry medium. Pastel allowed him to place one hue directly beside another without losing intensity. The resulting surface possesses a soft atmospheric unity while retaining the energy of individual strokes. The work’s history—gifted by Buehr to Mary Hess Buehr and subsequently descending through her family—also gives it a particularly intimate character. Rocky Inlet (France) presents another aspect of Buehr’s practice. In place of the cultivated garden and poised female figure, the artist confronts a rugged coastal landscape. Yet his essential concern remains light acting upon color. Rock, water, and vegetation are constructed through abbreviated touches rather than continuous modeling. The small scale suggests direct observation, possibly an outdoor study made during Buehr’s travels in Normandy. Its provenance likewise begins with Mary Hess Buehr and passes through the family before reaching David Saltzman and Robert Henry Adams Fine Art. This family provenance was central to the significance of the 1994 exhibition. The works had not merely circulated anonymously through the market; many retained a direct association with the artist’s household. Such a group could include informal studies, experimental compositions, and personal gifts that Buehr elected to keep rather than send to public exhibitions. Together they offered a more private and exploratory view of his career. Condition: relined canvas and cleaned Image/Canvas size: 10 x 9 inches Frame: 16-3/4 x 15-3/4 x 1-3/4 inches Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952): France and the Giverny Years Karl Albert Buehr—whose surname is sometimes misspelled “Beuhr”—was a German-born American painter and influential teacher associated with the second generation of American Impressionists working at Giverny. Although his artistic identity was rooted in Chicago, the years he spent in France transformed his palette, subject matter, and approach to painting. Born on February 14, 1866, in Feuerbach, near Stuttgart, Buehr immigrated with his family to Chicago, probably in 1881. After working briefly for a commercial lithographer, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1888. He studied with John H. Vanderpoel and graduated with honors in 1894, after which the school invited him to teach. He also served in the Illinois cavalry during the Spanish-American War and married Mary Guion Hess, one of his students and an accomplished artist in her own right. Early study in Europe Buehr’s European education unfolded in several stages. Around 1900 he settled in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian, principally under the French painter Raphaël Collin. Collin was known for idealized female figures placed in luminous outdoor settings, a combination of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist light that anticipated Buehr’s mature work. Buehr reportedly received a gold medal at the Académie in 1901. His early European paintings included portraits, landscapes, and scenes of rural labor. Visits to Holland exposed him to the restrained tonalism of the Hague School, while his travels in Italy—particularly Taormina, Sicily, during 1906 and 1907—encouraged a brighter response to Mediterranean sunlight. He also studied in London, where his contacts with Frank Brangwyn and the decorative currents of British painting strengthened his interest in broad design, rhythmic composition, and large arrangements of figures. A decisive factor in this extended European residence was the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1906 until 1913, Ward provided Buehr with a monthly stipend, enabling the artist, his wife, and their children to remain abroad and pursue their work without the immediate pressures of the American market. Buehr at Giverny Buehr entered the Anglo-American artistic community at Giverny around 1909, probably through his friendship with Henry Salem Hubbell, another American figure painter supported by Lydia Coonley Ward. From approximately 1909 through 1912, Buehr generally spent winters in Paris and the warmer months at Giverny. In 1912 and the summer of 1913, the family reportedly lived at Sainte-Geneviève-lès-Gasny, close to Giverny. By this date Giverny was no longer merely the village in which Claude Monet lived. It had become an international artists’ colony, particularly attractive to American painters who admired Impressionist color but wished to retain firm drawing and carefully organized figure compositions. Buehr’s associates included Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard Edward Miller, Guy Rose, Lawton Parker, Louis Ritman, Edmund Greacen, Karl Anderson, and Theodore Earl Butler. Buehr was especially close to the circle of Frieseke and Miller. These artists specialized in decorative paintings of fashionably dressed women reading, sewing, taking tea, or resting in sunlit gardens. Their figures were surrounded by flowers, patterned fabrics, parasols, and flickering passages of colored light. Buehr adopted this repertoire, but his paintings usually retained a stronger structural organization and a more assertive contrast between complementary colors. During his first months at Giverny, Buehr worked on a large decorative panel of dancing figures. The composition received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1910, an important professional recognition. That summer, however, he increasingly turned toward intimate garden scenes and outdoor figure studies. The influence of Richard Miller can be detected in the decorative arrangement of the figures, while Frieseke’s example encouraged Buehr s use of brilliant sunlight, patterned surfaces, and saturated hues. Relationship with Claude Monet Claude Monet was Buehr’s artistic hero, but the extent of their personal relationship should not be overstated. Buehr’s children played with the children of Theodore Butler, Monet’s son-in-law, and they visited the Monet household. Buehr’s daughter Kathleen later recalled that Monet was gracious to the children. Nevertheless, the best available scholarship suggests that no close personal association between Buehr and Monet has been documented. Monet’s importance to Buehr was therefore primarily artistic. At Giverny, Buehr learned to regard colored light as a central subject rather than merely a means of describing objects. Shadows became violet, blue, or green; white dresses reflected the surrounding garden; and faces and arms were modeled through small strokes of warm and cool color. The enclosed garden also became a kind of outdoor studio in which human figures, flowers, fabrics, and sunlight could be orchestrated into a unified decorative design. The Giverny style Buehr became best known for paintings of young women seated or standing in gardens, often accompanied by colorful parasols. Works such as Springtime in Giverny, Under the Parasol, and related pictures of women reading or conversing exemplify his mature style. Although inspired by French Impressionism, these paintings are not spontaneous transcriptions of fleeting visual experience in the strict Monet tradition. They are carefully staged figure compositions. Buehr himself explained that the outdoor figure painter should concentrate upon the ensemble—grouping, arrangement, and color—rather than laboriously describing every feature. This principle helps distinguish his Giverny paintings...

About the Artist: Samantha Buller currently lives in Sonoma County after painting and teaching in Kansas for the past two years. She received her BFA in Painting from the Academy of ...

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...

Kevin Weckbach's (US based) "Winter's Song" is an original, hand-made oil painting that depicts a secluded snowy forest in the early morning sunlight. Artist Statement: "Subject mat...

Painted en plein air, in Cape Code, Massachusetts. Clouds float in layers above a foreground of shoreline, where a cove of sea meets sand. Marc Dalessio was born in 1972 in Los Ange...

"Teepee/Indian Village" is an original oil painting on wood panel by Charles Damrow. The artist signed and dated the piece in the lower left. This paint...

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...