Hirschl & Adler

Wood (Cherry, with silver leaf finish), 34 x 7 in.

Signed (at lower right): A. WEISKOPF

Signed (at lower left): W.R. Miller/ 1851

Signed (at lower right): Ralph M. Rosenborg 1939; ll: 3/15 Woodcut

Mahogany

Anodized aluminum (green)

Anodized aluminum (black)

Bronze

Signed and dated (at lower left): W. R. Miller 1891; (at lower right): No. 10

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2004

Harry Humphrey Moore led a cosmopolitan lifestyle, dividing his time between Europe, New York City, and California. This globe-trotting painter was also active in Morocco, and most importantly, he was among the first generation of American artists to live and work in Japan, where he depicted temples, tombs, gardens, merchants, children, and Geisha girls. Praised by fellow painters such as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Moore’s fame was attributed to his exotic subject matter, as well as to the “brilliant coloring, delicate brush work [sic] and the always present depth of feeling” that characterized his work (Eugene A. Hajdel, Harry H. Moore, American 19th Century: Collection of Information on Harry Humphrey Moore, 19th Century Artist, Based on His Scrap Book and Other Data [Jersey City, New Jersey: privately published, 1950], p. 8). Born in New York City, Moore was the son of Captain George Humphrey, an affluent shipbuilder, and a descendant of the English painter, Ozias Humphrey (1742–1810). He became deaf at age three, and later went to special schools where he learned lip-reading and sign language. After developing an interest in art as a young boy, Moore studied painting with the portraitist Samuel Waugh in Philadelphia, where he met and became friendly with Eakins. He also received instruction from the painter Louis Bail in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1864, Moore attended classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and until 1907, he would visit the “City by the Bay” regularly. In 1865, Moore went to Europe, spending time in Munich before traveling to Paris, where, in October 1866, he resumed his formal training in Gérôme’s atelier, drawing inspiration from his teacher’s emphasis on authentic detail and his taste for picturesque genre subjects. There, Moore worked alongside Eakins, who had mastered sign language in order to communicate with his friend. In March 1867, Moore enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, honing his drawing skills under the tutelage of Adolphe Yvon, among other leading French painters. In December 1869, Moore traveled around Spain with Eakins and the Philadelphia engraver, William Sartain. In 1870, he went to Madrid, where he met the Spanish painters Mariano Fortuny and Martin Rico y Ortega. When Eakins and Sartain returned to Paris, Moore remained in Spain, painting depictions of Moorish life in cities such as Segovia and Granada and fraternizing with upper-crust society. In 1872, he married Isabella de Cistue, the well-connected daughter of Colonel Cistue of Saragossa, who was related to the Queen of Spain. For the next two-and-a-half years, the couple lived in Morocco, where Moore painted portraits, interiors, and streetscapes, often accompanied by an armed guard (courtesy of the Grand Sharif) when painting outdoors. (For this aspect of Moore’s oeuvre, see Gerald M. Ackerman, American Orientalists [Courbevoie, France: ACR Édition, 1994], pp. 135–39.) In 1873, he went to Rome, spending two years studying with Fortuny, whose lively technique, bright palette, and penchant for small-format genre scenes made a lasting impression on him. By this point in his career, Moore had emerged as a “rapid workman” who could “finish a picture of given size and containing a given subject quicker than most painters whose style is more simple and less exacting” (New York Times, as quoted in Hajdel, p. 23). In 1874, Moore settled in New York City, maintaining a studio on East 14th Street, where he would remain until 1880. During these years, he participated intermittently in the annuals of the National Academy of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, exhibiting Moorish subjects and views of Spain. A well-known figure in Bay Area art circles, Moore had a one-man show at the Snow & May Gallery in San Francisco in 1877, and a solo exhibition at the Bohemian Club, also in San Francisco, in 1880. Indeed, Moore fraternized with many members of the city’s cultural elite, including Katherine Birdsall Johnson (1834–1893), a philanthropist and art collector who owned The Captive (current location unknown), one of his Orientalist subjects. (Johnson’s ownership of The Captive was reported in L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist,” New York Times, July 23, 1893.) According to one contemporary account, Johnson invited Moore and his wife to accompany her on a trip to Japan in 1880 and they readily accepted. (For Johnson’s connection to Moore’s visit to Japan, see Emma Willard and Her Pupils; or, Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary [New York: Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898]. Johnson’s bond with the Moores was obviously strong, evidenced by the fact that she left them $25,000.00 in her will, which was published in the San Francisco Call on December 10, 1893.) That Moore would be receptive to making the arduous voyage across the Pacific is understandable in view of his penchant for foreign motifs. Having opened its doors to trade with the West in 1854, and in the wake of Japan’s presence at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, American artists were becoming increasingly fascinated by what one commentator referred to as that “ideal dreamland of the poet” (L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist”). Moore, who was in Japan during 1880–81, became one of the first American artists to travel to the “land of the rising sun,” preceded only by the illustrator, William Heime, who went there in 1851 in conjunction with the Japanese expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry; Edward Kern, a topographical artist and explorer who mapped the Japanese coast in 1855; and the Boston landscapist, Winckleworth Allan Gay, a resident of Japan from 1877 to 1880. More specifically, as William H. Gerdts has pointed out, Moore was the “first American painter to seriously address the appearance and mores of the Japanese people” (William H. Gerdts, American Artists in Japan, 1859–1925, exhib. cat. [New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1996], p. 5). During his sojourn in Nippon (which means, “The Land of the Rising Sun”), Moore spent time in locales such as Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Nikko, and Osaka, carefully observing the local citizenry, their manners and mode of dress, and the country’s distinctive architecture. Working on easily portable panels, he created about sixty scenes of daily life, among them this depiction of an interior of a dwelling. The location of the view is unknown, but the presence of a rustic rail fence demarcating a yard bordering a distant house flanked by tall trees, shrubs and some blossoming fruit trees, suggests that the work likely portrays a building in a city suburb or a small village. In his book, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, Edward S. Morse (an American zoologist, orientalist, and “japanophile” who taught at Tokyo Imperial University from 1877 to 1879, and visited Japan again in 1891 and 1882) noted the “openness and accessibility of the Japanese house...

Signed and dated (at lower left): Randall Exon 07

Signed (on stretcher): Stanley Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hards...

Signed (on stretcher): Stanley/ Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hard...

Signed (on stretcher): Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hardscrabble u...

Silverpoint and colored pencil on paper, 29 x 23 in. Signed (at lower right): Joseph Stella Executed about 1919 EXHIBITED: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, November 23, 1985–January 4, 1986, American Masterworks on Paper: Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints, pp. 6, 46 no. 47 illus. // (probably) Richard York Gallery, New York, October 5–November 17, 1990, Joseph Stella: 100 Works on Paper, no. 36 EX COLL.: [Dudensing Galleries, New York]; sale, Christie’s, New York, December 7, 1984, lot 324; [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1984]; to private collection, 2006 until the present An independent-minded artist who adhered to the credo “Rules don’t exist,” Joseph Stella explored a range of styles, media, and themes, willfully ignoring the “barricades erected by ... [the] self-appointed dictators” of the art establishment (Joseph Stella, “On Painting,” Broom 11 [December 1921], pp. 122–23; Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes,” Art News 59 [November 1960], p. 41). By doing so, he produced a diverse and highly eclectic body of work, ranging from realist figure subjects, pulsating Futurist cityscapes, and modernist religious...

In 1852, twenty-nine year old William Bradford was a failing shopkeeper in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. With a wife and child at home, Bradford, by his own admission, “spent too much time in painting to succeed” in business. Rescued from insolvency by his well-to-do in-laws, this is not the beginning of a narrative that generally leads to a happy ending. Not so with Bradford, who ultimately found international fame and fortune as a painter of arctic seascapes and dramatic marine paintings. William Bradford, the artist, was a lineal descendant of the 17th-century Separatist leader William Bradford, a founder of the Plymouth Plantation, signer of the Mayflower Compact and Governor of the Plymouth Colony. Our Bradford born to a New Bedford ship outfitter in Fairhaven, Massachusetts By the nineteenth century, this line of Bradfords were Quakers, living on the tract purchased nearly two centuries earlier by their pilgrim ancestor. Fairhaven, across the mouth of the Acushnet River from the whaling center of New Bedford was described by a New York journalist in 1857 as “the Brooklyn of New Bedford” (Home Journal, January 3, 1857). Young Bradford displayed an early predilection for the arts, but his Quaker parents were disinclined to support this particular pursuit. After working in his father’s business and then for a dry goods merchant in New Bedford, by 1849 Bradford had set up in New Bedford as a “merchant tailor” offering outfits for “those going to California,” “seamen’s clothing,” custom-tailored “piece goods...

Gouache on board, 20 x 24 in. Signed (at lower right): Atherton Painted about 1940 RECORDED: Art News (May 11, 1940), illus. [clipping citation] EXHIBITED: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1940, The International Watercolor Exhibition, no. 156, illus. on cover as Bird in Cage...

Looking at a painting by Colin Hunt is like watching someone pass through a hole in our consciousness. As the landscape refracts through the sitter’s absence and fills that emptiness...

Unsigned

Unsigned

Unsigned

Signed (on verso): AF/2021

Signed (at lower center): Guy

Signed (at lower right): MOORE

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE 21

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE 21

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE 12

Signed and dated (at lower right): Randall Exon '20

Harry Humphrey Moore led a cosmopolitan lifestyle, dividing his time between Europe, New York City, and California. This globe-trotting painter was also active in Morocco, and most importantly, he was among the first generation of American artists to live and work in Japan, where he depicted temples, tombs, gardens, merchants, children, and Geisha girls. Praised by fellow painters such as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Moore’s fame was attributed to his exotic subject matter, as well as to the “brilliant coloring, delicate brush work [sic] and the always present depth of feeling” that characterized his work (Eugene A. Hajdel, Harry H. Moore, American 19th Century: Collection of Information on Harry Humphrey Moore, 19th Century Artist, Based on His Scrap Book and Other Data [Jersey City, New Jersey: privately published, 1950], p. 8). Born in New York City, Moore was the son of Captain George Humphrey, an affluent shipbuilder, and a descendant of the English painter, Ozias Humphrey (1742–1810). He became deaf at age three, and later went to special schools where he learned lip-reading and sign language. After developing an interest in art as a young boy, Moore studied painting with the portraitist Samuel Waugh in Philadelphia, where he met and became friendly with Eakins. He also received instruction from the painter Louis Bail in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1864, Moore attended classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and until 1907, he would visit the “City by the Bay” regularly. In 1865, Moore went to Europe, spending time in Munich before traveling to Paris, where, in October 1866, he resumed his formal training in Gérôme’s atelier, drawing inspiration from his teacher’s emphasis on authentic detail and his taste for picturesque genre subjects. There, Moore worked alongside Eakins, who had mastered sign language in order to communicate with his friend. In March 1867, Moore enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, honing his drawing skills under the tutelage of Adolphe Yvon, among other leading French painters. In December 1869, Moore traveled around Spain with Eakins and the Philadelphia engraver, William Sartain. In 1870, he went to Madrid, where he met the Spanish painters Mariano Fortuny and Martin Rico y Ortega. When Eakins and Sartain returned to Paris, Moore remained in Spain, painting depictions of Moorish life in cities such as Segovia and Granada and fraternizing with upper-crust society. In 1872, he married Isabella de Cistue, the well-connected daughter of Colonel Cistue of Saragossa, who was related to the Queen of Spain. For the next two-and-a-half years, the couple lived in Morocco, where Moore painted portraits, interiors, and streetscapes, often accompanied by an armed guard (courtesy of the Grand Sharif) when painting outdoors. (For this aspect of Moore’s oeuvre, see Gerald M. Ackerman, American Orientalists [Courbevoie, France: ACR Édition, 1994], pp. 135–39.) In 1873, he went to Rome, spending two years studying with Fortuny, whose lively technique, bright palette, and penchant for small-format genre scenes made a lasting impression on him. By this point in his career, Moore had emerged as a “rapid workman” who could “finish a picture of given size and containing a given subject quicker than most painters whose style is more simple and less exacting” (New York Times, as quoted in Hajdel, p. 23). In 1874, Moore settled in New York City, maintaining a studio on East 14th Street, where he would remain until 1880. During these years, he participated intermittently in the annuals of the National Academy of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, exhibiting Moorish subjects and views of Spain. A well-known figure in Bay Area art circles, Moore had a one-man show at the Snow & May Gallery in San Francisco in 1877, and a solo exhibition at the Bohemian Club, also in San Francisco, in 1880. Indeed, Moore fraternized with many members of the city’s cultural elite, including Katherine Birdsall Johnson (1834–1893), a philanthropist and art collector who owned The Captive (current location unknown), one of his Orientalist subjects. (Johnson’s ownership of The Captive was reported in L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist,” New York Times, July 23, 1893.) According to one contemporary account, Johnson invited Moore and his wife to accompany her on a trip to Japan in 1880 and they readily accepted. (For Johnson’s connection to Moore’s visit to Japan, see Emma Willard and Her Pupils; or, Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary [New York: Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898]. Johnson’s bond with the Moores was obviously strong, evidenced by the fact that she left them $25,000.00 in her will, which was published in the San Francisco Call on December 10, 1893.) That Moore would be receptive to making the arduous voyage across the Pacific is understandable in view of his penchant for foreign motifs. Having opened its doors to trade with the West in 1854, and in the wake of Japan’s presence at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, American artists were becoming increasingly fascinated by what one commentator referred to as that “ideal dreamland of the poet” (L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist”). Moore, who was in Japan during 1880–81, became one of the first American artists to travel to the “land of the rising sun,” preceded only by the illustrator, William Heime, who went there in 1851 in conjunction with the Japanese expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry; Edward Kern, a topographical artist and explorer who mapped the Japanese coast in 1855; and the Boston landscapist, Winckleworth Allan Gay, a resident of Japan from 1877 to 1880. More specifically, as William H. Gerdts has pointed out, Moore was the “first American painter to seriously address the appearance and mores of the Japanese people” (William H. Gerdts, American Artists in Japan, 1859–1925, exhib. cat. [New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1996], p. 5). During his sojourn in Japan, Moore spent time in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Nikko, and Osaka, carefully observing the local citizenry, their manners and mode of dress, and the country’s distinctive architecture. Working on easily portable panels, he created about sixty scenes of daily life, among them this sparkling portrayal of a young woman dressed in a traditional kimono and carrying a baby on her back, a paper parasol...

Harry Humphrey Moore led a cosmopolitan lifestyle, dividing his time between Europe, New York City, and California. This globe-trotting painter was also active in Morocco, and most importantly, he was among the first generation of American artists to live and work in Japan, where he depicted temples, tombs, gardens, merchants, children, and Geisha girls. Praised by fellow painters such as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Moore’s fame was attributed to his exotic subject matter, as well as to the “brilliant coloring, delicate brush work [sic] and the always present depth of feeling” that characterized his work (Eugene A. Hajdel, Harry H. Moore, American 19th Century: Collection of Information on Harry Humphrey Moore, 19th Century Artist, Based on His Scrap Book and Other Data [Jersey City, New Jersey: privately published, 1950], p. 8). Born in New York City, Moore was the son of Captain George Humphrey, an affluent shipbuilder, and a descendant of the English painter, Ozias Humphrey (1742–1810). He became deaf at age three, and later went to special schools where he learned lip-reading and sign language. After developing an interest in art as a young boy, Moore studied painting with the portraitist Samuel Waugh in Philadelphia, where he met and became friendly with Eakins. He also received instruction from the painter Louis Bail in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1864, Moore attended classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and until 1907, he would visit the “City by the Bay” regularly. In 1865, Moore went to Europe, spending time in Munich before traveling to Paris, where, in October 1866, he resumed his formal training in Gérôme’s atelier, drawing inspiration from his teacher’s emphasis on authentic detail and his taste for picturesque genre subjects. There, Moore worked alongside Eakins, who had mastered sign language in order to communicate with his friend. In March 1867, Moore enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, honing his drawing skills under the tutelage of Adolphe Yvon, among other leading French painters. In December 1869, Moore traveled around Spain with Eakins and the Philadelphia engraver, William Sartain. In 1870, he went to Madrid, where he met the Spanish painters Mariano Fortuny and Martin Rico y Ortega. When Eakins and Sartain returned to Paris, Moore remained in Spain, painting depictions of Moorish life in cities such as Segovia and Granada and fraternizing with upper-crust society. In 1872, he married Isabella de Cistue, the well-connected daughter of Colonel Cistue of Saragossa, who was related to the Queen of Spain. For the next two-and-a-half years, the couple lived in Morocco, where Moore painted portraits, interiors, and streetscapes, often accompanied by an armed guard (courtesy of the Grand Sharif) when painting outdoors. (For this aspect of Moore’s oeuvre, see Gerald M. Ackerman, American Orientalists [Courbevoie, France: ACR Édition, 1994], pp. 135–39.) In 1873, he went to Rome, spending two years studying with Fortuny, whose lively technique, bright palette, and penchant for small-format genre scenes made a lasting impression on him. By this point in his career, Moore had emerged as a “rapid workman” who could “finish a picture of given size and containing a given subject quicker than most painters whose style is more simple and less exacting” (New York Times, as quoted in Hajdel, p. 23). In 1874, Moore settled in New York City, maintaining a studio on East 14th Street, where he would remain until 1880. During these years, he participated intermittently in the annuals of the National Academy of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, exhibiting Moorish subjects and views of Spain. A well-known figure in Bay Area art circles, Moore had a one-man show at the Snow & May Gallery in San Francisco in 1877, and a solo exhibition at the Bohemian Club, also in San Francisco, in 1880. Indeed, Moore fraternized with many members of the city’s cultural elite, including Katherine Birdsall Johnson (1834–1893), a philanthropist and art collector who owned The Captive (current location unknown), one of his Orientalist subjects. (Johnson’s ownership of The Captive was reported in L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist,” New York Times, July 23, 1893.) According to one contemporary account, Johnson invited Moore and his wife to accompany her on a trip to Japan in 1880 and they readily accepted. (For Johnson’s connection to Moore’s visit to Japan, see Emma Willard and Her Pupils; or, Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary [New York: Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898]. Johnson’s bond with the Moores was obviously strong, evidenced by the fact that she left them $25,000.00 in her will, which was published in the San Francisco Call on December 10, 1893.) That Moore would be receptive to making the arduous voyage across the Pacific is understandable in view of his penchant for foreign motifs. Having opened its doors to trade with the West in 1854, and in the wake of Japan’s presence at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, American artists were becoming increasingly fascinated by what one commentator referred to as that “ideal dreamland of the poet” (L. K., “A Popular Paris Artist”). Moore, who was in Japan during 1880–81, became one of the first American artists to travel to the “land of the rising sun,” preceded only by the illustrator, William Heime, who went there in 1851 in conjunction with the Japanese expedition of Commodore Matthew C. Perry; Edward Kern, a topographical artist and explorer who mapped the Japanese coast in 1855; and the Boston landscapist, Winckleworth Allan Gay, a resident of Japan from 1877 to 1880. More specifically, as William H. Gerdts has pointed out, Moore was the “first American painter to seriously address the appearance and mores of the Japanese people” (William H. Gerdts, American Artists in Japan, 1859–1925, exhib. cat. [New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1996], p. 5). During his sojourn in Japan, Moore spent time in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Nikko, and Osaka, carefully observing the local citizenry, their manners and mode of dress, and the country’s distinctive architecture. Working on easily portable wood panels, he created about sixty scenes of daily life, among them this picturesque vignette of a Japanese tea garden...

Signed (at lower left): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ

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

Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hardscrabble upbringing in Detroit to become a po...

Signed (at lower right): Bailey 1977

Singed (at lower left): Jane Peterson

Signed (at lower right): DJ [monogram]; (on back): David Johnson 1865

Signed and dated (at lower right): MOORE '18

Signed on back

Signed on verso

Suite of 5 drawings Charcoal and Getty Fire Ash on paper, 24 x 18 in. (each)

Pair of drawings Charcoal and Getty Fire Ash on paper, 24 x 18 in. (each)

Suite of 3 drawings Charcoal and Getty Fire Ash on paper, 24 x 18 in (each)

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2018

Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021

Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021

Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021

Oil on linen, 20 x 26 in.

Oil on paperboard, 20 x 30 in.

Signed and dated (on verso): Robert Minervini 2019

Signed (on verso): Robert Minervini / 2019 / 2 Vases

Signed and dated (at lower right): Randall Exon 2012

Signed and dated (at lower right): Randall Exon 2018

Signed and dated (at lower right): Randall Exon 2016

Anodized aluminum, dark blue

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and apprenticed in Boston with Henry Hobson Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury Howard, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals, and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...

Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882

Framed, 5.25 x 8.5 x 1.5 in.

Signed and dated (at lower left): J. STONE ROBERTS. /2019/20.

Anodized aluminum (gold)