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Lilies, Orange and Pink Pelargonium, Roses, and other Flowers in a Greek Vase
By Johan Laurentz Jensen
Located in New York, NY
From 1833 to 1835 Johan Laurentz Jensen lived in France and Italy; while in Rome, he was considered the most prominent painter in an extensive colony of Scandinavian artists there. I...
Category
19th Century Romantic Still-life Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
Gloria
By Franz Kline
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): FK [in monogram}
EXHIBITED: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 1–November 24, 1968; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, December 17, 1968–Jan...
Category
Mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionist Nude Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Price Upon Request
Below South Ferry
By Franz Kline
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): KLINE
EXHIBITED: Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, November 1–30, 1960, The November Show, as “Moonlight in Lower Manhattan” // Pratt Institute, Brooklyn...
Category
Mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionist Landscape Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Chatham Square
By Franz Kline
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower left): FRANZ KLINE
RECORDED: Elizabeth Johnson, “Franz Kline’s Roots in Coal and Steel—at Allentown Art Museum,” Artblog (December 21. 2012), illus. in color // Tim...
Category
Mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionist Landscape Paintings
Materials
Oil, Canvas
Price Upon Request
VIRTUS (Virtue)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): L; (on the back): D. Ligare / 2024
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
SOLIS (Sunlight)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
PERMETTO (To Allow)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
ORDINE NATURAE (The Order of Nature)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2015
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
DISCERE (To Learn)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
SCIRE (To Know)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed with initial (at lower right): L
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Landscape with an Owl (ATHENE NOCTUA) (Owl of Athena)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
A Specific View (SCIENTIA, ARTE, VENUSTAS) (Knowledge, Skill, Beauty)
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
No. 12-1962
By Stanley Twardowicz
Located in New York, NY
Signed (on verso): Stanley Twardowicz
Category
1960s Contemporary Abstract Paintings
Materials
Acrylic
Untitled (Island)
By Colin Hunt
Located in New York, NY
In Colin Hunt’s new paintings, myriad tiny rocks, grains of sand, and strands of rockweed form a coastal beach, while lush forests pierce a crystalline sky. Elsewhere, palpable mists...
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Panel, Egg Tempera
Untitled (Fallen Spruce)
By Colin Hunt
Located in New York, NY
In Colin Hunt’s new paintings, myriad tiny rocks, grains of sand, and strands of rockweed form a coastal beach, while lush forests pierce a crystalline sky. Elsewhere, palpable mists...
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Egg Tempera, Panel
Untitled (Dead Low)
By Colin Hunt
Located in New York, NY
In Colin Hunt’s new paintings, myriad tiny rocks, grains of sand, and strands of rockweed form a coastal beach, while lush forests pierce a crystalline sky. Elsewhere, palpable mists...
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Egg Tempera, Panel
The Circle is Cast, We Are Between the Worlds
By Angela Fraleigh
Located in New York, NY
In Angela Fraleigh’s dynamic paintings, female subjects culled from art history become active protagonists in newly imagined spaces. In their original contexts, these figures were largely painted as docile objects for the male gaze...
Category
2010s Figurative Paintings
Materials
Oil, Acrylic
Turn Your Eyes to the Heavens and Say Three Times: I do not have to be good
By Angela Fraleigh
Located in New York, NY
Is it discomfort, or excitement, that you feel when you watch these women languidly roust, or subtly drift asleep? Do you happily play the voyeur, seduced by their beauty and the opu...
Category
2010s Nude Paintings
Materials
Oil, Acrylic
Offering: Grapes & Fig
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
David Ligare (b. 1945)
Contemporary American Painter
"Offering: Grapes & Fig," 2023
Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in.
Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): Ligare / 2023
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Oil, Canvas
Spill (Ashdod)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Paintings
Materials
Oil
Still Life with Squash and Pink Pitcher
By Amy Weiskopf
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): A. Weiskopf
Category
2010s Realist Still-life Paintings
Materials
Linen, Oil
Still Life with Green Cabbages
By Amy Weiskopf
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): A. Weiskopf
Category
2010s Realist Still-life Paintings
Materials
Linen, Oil
Pink and Green Plant
By Amy Weiskopf
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): A. Weiskopf
Category
2010s Still-life Paintings
Materials
Linen, Oil
Red Earth and Spotted Cows
By Zama Vanessa Helder
Located in New York, NY
Watercolor on paper
Category
1940s American Realist Landscape Paintings
Materials
Paper, Watercolor
Self-Portrait as Mad Queen
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Self-Portrait (Lion Birth)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Self-Portrait as Throne
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Spill (Birds)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Spill (Climbers)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Spill (Laocoön)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Spill (Seed Pod)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Spill (The Fall)
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Self-Portrait with Sanctuary
By Julie Heffernan
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Rose Antiqua
By Robert Minervini
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Still Life in a Landscape
By Paul LaCroix
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
19th Century Still-life Paintings
Materials
Oil
Still Life of Peonies, Roses, Honeysuckle, Poppies, and other Flowers
Located in New York, NY
This painting demonstrates the source of Arnoldus Bloemers’ enduring popularity. A profusion of peonies, honeysuckle, and poppies share the confines of a terracotta urn sitting on a ...
Category
19th Century Romantic Still-life Paintings
Materials
Oil
Still Life with Flowers in a Vase
By Martin Johnson Heade
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
19th Century Still-life Paintings
Materials
Oil
September
By Randall Exon
Located in New York, NY
Oil on panel
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
$18,000
White Sand
By Randall Exon
Located in New York, NY
Oil on panel
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
$10,000
Prop
By Randall Exon
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Oil, Canvas
$20,000
The Chesapeake
By Randall Exon
Located in New York, NY
Oil on Canvas
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Many-Worlds Interpretation (C.D.H.I.A.H.)
By Colin Hunt
Located in New York, NY
Abstract image made using egg tempera on hardboard panel.
Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
Materials
Egg Tempera
Table by the Window
By Edmund Quincy
Located in New York, NY
Estate stamp (on back, on original stretcher): Estate of/ Edmund Quincy/ 1903-1997 ///
Category
20th Century American Realist Portrait Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
The Writer
By Edmund Quincy
Located in New York, NY
Signed (lower right): Quincy
Category
20th Century American Realist Portrait Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Jardin des Tuileries, Paris
By Edmund Quincy
Located in New York, NY
Signed (lower right): Quincy
Category
20th Century American Realist Figurative Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
In Search of Solitude
By Robert Minervini
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (on verso): Robert Minervini / 2020-2021
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Acrylic
Excavation
By Charles Houghton Howard
Located in New York, NY
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 H. H. Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury, 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, no. 2 [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...
Category
20th Century American Modern Abstract Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Surface Tension
By Robert Minervini
Located in New York, NY
Robert Minervini (b.1981 Secaucus, NJ) is an artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking, murals, and site-specific public art. His work examines spatial environments and notion...
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Paper, Acrylic
Old Country Bazaar
By William S. Schwartz
Located in New York, NY
Oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in.
Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower right): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ 1926; (on the back): “OLD COUNTRY BAZAAR” / BY / WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ / 1926
RECORDED: C. H. Bonte, “122nd Annual opens at Pennsylvania Academy,” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 30, 1927
EXHIBITED: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1926, The Thirty-Ninth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, no. 174 // The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1927, The One-Hundred-and-Twenty Second Annual Exhibition, p. 37 no. 181 // The Chicago Culture Club...
Category
20th Century American Modern Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Japanese Children with Tortoise
By Harry Humphrey Moore
Located in New York, NY
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...
Category
Late 19th Century Figurative Paintings
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Hydrangeas and Other Garden Flowers
By John Ross Key
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882
Category
Late 19th Century American Realist Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Playground
By Robert Vickrey
Located in New York, NY
Signed (lower right): Robert Vickrey
Category
Late 20th Century American Modern Paintings
Materials
Masonite, Tempera
Untitled [Abstraction]
By George L.K. Morris
Located in New York, NY
Gouache on paper, 18 7/8 x 14 3/4 in.
Signed (at lower right): Morris; (with monogram, on the back): GLKM [monogram] / 1932 [sic]
Executed circa late 1940s
A passionate advocate of abstract art during the 1930s and 1940s, George L. K. Morris was active as a painter, sculptor, editor, and critic. An erudite man with an internationalist point of view, Morris
eschewed the social, political, and figural concerns that preoccupied so many artists of Depression-era America, believing that painters should focus their attention on the beauty, refinement, and simplicity of pure form instead. His goal, he said, was “to wedge the expression further and further into the confines of the canvas until every shape takes on a spatial meaning” (as quoted in Ward Jackson, “George L. K. Morris: Forty Years of Abstract Art,” Art Journal 32 [Winter 1972–73], p. 150).
Born into an affluent family in New York City, Morris was a descendent of General Lewis Morris, a
signer of the Declaration of Independence. From 1918 until 1924, he attended the Groton School in
Connecticut, studying classics and art. He continued to focus on literature and art while attending
Yale University (1924–28), an experience that prepared him well for his future activity as an artist-critic. After graduating in 1928, Morris studied at the Art Students League of New York, working
under the realist painters John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, as well as Jan Matulka, the only
modernist on the faculty. In the spring of 1929, Morris traveled to Paris with Albert E. Gallatin, a
family friend and fellow painter who introduced him to leading members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian. Morris also took classes at the Académie Moderne, studying under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, important exponents of Synthetic Cubism who influenced his aesthetic development. Indeed, after experimenting with the simplified forms of Modernism for a few years, Morris moved on to abstraction by 1934, adopting a hard-edged, geometric approach inspired by Leger’s cubist style and the biomorphic shapes of Arp and Joan Miró.
Following his return to New York in 1930, Morris built a white-walled, open-spaced studio (inspired
by that of Ozenfant, which had been designed by Le Corbusier) on the grounds of Brockhurst, his
parents’ 46-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1935, he married the painter and collagist Estelle “Suzy...
Category
1940s American Modern Abstract Paintings
Materials
Paper, Gouache
Winter on the River
By Randall Exon
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (at lower right): 2011
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Materials
Oil
The Stars Rise, the Moon Bends Her Arc
By Angela Fraleigh
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (on verso): Angela Fraleigh 2021
Category
2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings
Materials
Linen, Oil
Still Life with Squash
By Amy Weiskopf
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower right): A. WEISKOPF
Category
Late 20th Century Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Linen, Oil
New York from Hoboken
By William Rickarby Miller
Located in New York, NY
Signed (at lower left): W.R. Miller/ 1851
Category
Mid-19th Century American Realist Landscape Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Still Life with Apples
By William Rickarby Miller
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (at lower left): W. R. Miller 1891; (at lower right): No. 10
Category
Late 19th Century American Realist Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Thrown Drapery (Redux) Study 1
By David Ligare
Located in New York, NY
Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2004
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Still-life Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Interior of a Japanese House
By Harry Humphrey Moore
Located in New York, NY
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...
Category
Late 19th Century Interior Paintings
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel