Lincoln Glenn Paintings

Artist Unknown (20th century) New York City Skyline, 1950s Oil, watercolor and gouache on paper 13 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches A bright abstract skyline view of a metropolis on a blue / teal background with red, yellow, and blue lights...

Joseph Rodefer DeCamp (1858 - 1923) Summer Landscape Oil on board 11 x 15 inches Signed lower right Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on November 5, 1858, Joseph DeCamp began his artistic career in his teens and remained active throughout his life. Although he initially painted landscapes, Decamp became a renowned and respected portraitist. He was famous for his images of men of high society and women within domestic interiors. Decamp began his artistic training in 1873 when he enrolled in the McMicken School of Art and Design in Cincinnati. The head of the school, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, was a European-trained painter whose "insistence on rigorous draftsmanship, true to the academic manner in which he had been trained, exerted a lasting influence on DeCamp." DeCamp studied under Noble for five years, but was also a student of Frank Duveneck at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. He adopted Duveneck's bold, realistic style and many of his paintings executed throughout the 1870s and 1880s reflect this influence. Like most American artists of his generation, DeCamp went abroad to study. In 1878, following in the footsteps of Duveneck and other Midwesterners, he traveled to Munich to attend the Royal Bavarian Academy. Soon after his arrival, however, he gravitated away from the academy and towards Duveneck and eventually followed his mentor to Florence and Venice. During these years, DeCamp focused on landscape and portraiture as his primary subjects. These themes would continue to occupy the artist when he returned to America in 1883. When DeCamp arrived back in the United States in 1883, he first settled in Cincinnati, but soon moved to Cleveland to teach at what is now Case Western Reserve University. He then relocated once more to the Boston area, where he would remain for most of his life. DeCamp began teaching at Wellesley Female Academy and, in the fall of 1885, began as an instructor at the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He quickly established himself as one of the leading figures in the Boston art community and became a founding member of The Ten American Painters, formulated in 1897. This group included Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman, Julian Alden Weir, Frank Benson, Thomas Dewing, Willard Metcalf, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons...

William M. Hart (1823 - 1894) Interior of a Stable Oil on canvas 17 x 12 inches Provenance William Macbeth Gallery, New York Mrs. Mabel Brady Garvan Collection Christie's New York, Sporting Art, November 28, 1995, Lot 116 Ann Carter Stonesifer, Maryland Estate of above Brunk Auctions, Asheville, North Carolina, January 27 2018, Lot 777 Exhibited New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Life in America, April 24 - October 29, 1939, no. 123, illustrated. New York, Macbeth Gallery, 1892: Sixtieth Anniversary Exhibition, April 1952, p. 5, no. 18. Literature Turner Reuter Jr, Animal and Sporting Artists in America, Middleburg, Virginia, 2008, p. 306. Gary Stiles, William Hart: Catalogue Raisonné and Artistic Biography, no. 1126, illustrated. It should be noted that the Francis Patrick Garvan and Mrs. Mabel Brady Garvan collection, of which this painting was a part of, was one of the foremost American Art collections and now makes up a large part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery collections. Born in 1823 in Paisley, Scotland, William Hart emigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of nine and settled in Albany, New York. It was here that Hart first began his artistic training when he was placed under the tutelage of Messrs, Eaton & Gilbert, the prestigious coach-makers from Troy, New York. During this time, Hart learned how to decorate coach panels, covering them with either landscapes or figurative compositions. At the age of seventeen, he was eagerly contemplating an artist’s profession. Consequently, he left the mechanical trade of coach-making and began expanding his artistic pursuits to more refined endeavors. Hart followed coach-making with decorating window shades and later developed an interest in portraiture. Around 1840, he established his first formal studio in his father’s woodshed in Troy. There, he created many likenesses of individuals, affording him a nominal income. Once, he remarked that he felt prouder over his first fee of five dollars for painting a head then for the larger sums he would command later in his career. Nevertheless, his wages from portraits during this early period proved insufficient. Thus, he expanded into landscape painting, allowing him to barter his works or sell them for modest prices. In 1842, Hart moved to Michigan in an attempt to further his success; portraiture remained his primary means of support. Unfortunately, his experiences in the West were disappointing. Hart spent three years living a rough existence until he finally returned to Albany in 1845. Upon his return, he fully devoted himself to the art of landscape painting. Despite his failing health, he worked diligently to perfect his skill until 1849 when he traveled abroad to his native land of Scotland. This trip was made possible through the generosity of his patron and advisor, Dr. Ormsby of Albany. For three years, he studied in the open-air, creating brilliant sketches of the Scottish Highlands and the surrounding British Isles. Returning to Albany once more in 1852, Hart enjoyed improved health and was reinvigorated with purpose. The following year, he moved to New York and opened a studio, promoting himself as a specialist in landscape painting. Hart became a regular contributor to the National Academy of Design. His works received a great deal of attention from artists and connoisseurs alike, all of whom praised him for his fresh, self-taught style. In 1855, he was designated as an associate of the National Academy of Design; three years later he was elected to Academician. In 1865, he was unanimously chosen to be the first president of the Brooklyn Academy of Design. It was during his tenure there that he delivered his famous lecture The Field and Easel, which emphasized the distinguishing principles of landscape art in America. Hart argued that landscape painters should express the “look of the place” being depicted.Critics during the 1870s noted his sensitive balance between capturing a strict “real” interpretation of nature and that of a more “ideal” sentimental tone. For instance, in 1869, Putnam Magazine noted that Hart brought back “exquisite studies” of the surrounding Tappan...

Leo Schutzman (1878 - 1962) Simchat Torah in the Synagogue, circa 1958 Oil on canvas 40 x 36 inches Signed lower left Provenance: The Contemporaries Gal...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943 Watercolor on paper Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

Bruce Crane (1857 - 1937) Autumn Landscape Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Signed lower right Robert Bruce Crane was an American painter. He joined the Lyme Art Colony in the early 190...

Will Moses (American, b. 1956) Turkey Trot, 2012 Oil on board 8 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches Signed lower right Soft, shadowy foothills dotted with traditional white farmhouses; weathered red barns tilted haphazardly on broad patchwork sweeps of green and hay-gold fields; small clusters of black and white cows grazing placidly in the distance…it's all part of Moses Country. And, the 200 year-old farmhouse, where Will Moses has his studio, is as solidly traditional as the surrounding landscape…the white house where the legendary Grandma Moses began her career. Born and raised here, in Eagle Bridge, New York, Will Moses creates paintings that reflect the quiet beauty of this tiny community nestled close to the Vermont border. Will has created a vivid, delightful miniature world, peopled with villagers who have stepped out of the past to charm us with their simple, everyday pastimes. As a fourth generation member of the renowned Moses family, painting is a natural tradition for Will, who began painting when he was four years old. Encouraged by his grandfather, a well-known folk painter in his own right, young Will was allowed to experiment freely with paints. Forrest K. Moses was totally committed to self-expression and passed this freedom of spirit along to his young grandson. Stimulated by his grandfather's confident approach, Will developed his own unique style of Americana. Today, Will continues to carry on the family tradition. Although his style is reminiscent of that of his celebrated great-grandmother, it is more complex and sophisticated. Basically self-taught, Will has honed his technique to capture all the most minute details in sharp-edged focus. It is a technique that has gained him considerable attention in art circles. Will Moses has had several well acclaimed exhibitions of his work in the United States, Canada and Japan. The Japanese are enthusiastic collectors of Will's art and Will has personally toured Japan with an exhibition of his work there. In North America, Will continues to make appearances at art galleries and folk art shows, meeting friends, collectors and admirers of his work. Recent public exhibitions of Will's work have taken place at the Cahoon Museum of American Art, The Everson Museum, The Bennington Museum, the North Shore Art Gallery and the President Ford and Reagan Libraries. Will continues his work illustrating and writing children's books. Philomel Books/Penguin Books for Young Readers, have now published ten books to date: Silent Night, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van...

Rosamond Berg (American, 1931 - 2018) Voyage I, 1982 Mixed media construction including hand-dyed cotton cloth pouches 24 x 24 inches Signed, titled an...

Émile-Pierre Metzmacher (French, 1815 - 1890) A Young Beauty Crossing a Brook, A Hunter Beyond Oil on panel 24 x 19 1/2 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Christie's New York, Oct...

Yvonne Jacquette (American, b. 1935) Tokyo Diptych, 1985 Pastel on paper Overall 17 1/4 x 28 1/2 inches Signed lower center Provenance: Carey Ellis Company, Houston, Texas Brooke Alexander, New York Collection of an American Corporation Exhibited: New York, Brooke Alexander, Yvonne Jacquette: Tokyo Nightviews, April 5 - May 3, 1986, n.p., illustrated; this exhibition later traveled to Brunswick, Maine, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Yvonne Jacquette: Tokyo Nightviews, June 27 - August 24, 1986. Yvonne Jacquette has a preference for high places, a circling plane, a penthouse window, an aerie from which to watch the world. Her work has often depicted the city and man-made landscape from the vantage of angels. It is a privileged perspective, long loved by photographers, who were perhaps the first to recognize the geometric grandeur of the city below. That grandeur structures Jacquette's images but is not its full content. Her work attempts to resolve the visual and emotional pardoxes of the modern metropolis. Only from the tower is there the possibility of order and context. And unlaced beauty. Jacquette first visited Japan in 1982. Nighttime Tokyo, its cars and crowds and canyons of loud Vegas neon, made a vivid and bewildering impression on her. The neon signs, pulsing, scaling the walls of high rises, fascinated the artist, "like Times Square spread over miles." Her fascination was equal parts marvel, confusion, and curiosity—the sparks of art. She returned to Tokyo in May of 1985, choosing hotel rooms with expansive vistas. From these views Jacquette excerpted images for a series of pastel night scenes. The basic forms and colors of each drawing were blocked in during night sessions by the window. She worked in the dark, selecting colors by flashlight. In daylight, she sharpened the geometry and corrected ambiguous passages. She refined the drawings further in the studio until the images read clearly. Photographic correctness was not important. The finished drawings are complete statements, not simply preparatory sketches for paintings. They have the authority of expert witness. In clear, discreet jots of pastel they record the performance of seeing, each touch of color attesting to a moment's close scrutiny. Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence from 1952 to 1955, when she moved to New York City. Her late husband was photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and the couple were part of a circle of artist friends that included Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, and Mimi Gross. She continues to live and work in New York City, as well as in Searsmont, Maine. A flight to San Diego in 1969 sparked Jacquette’s interest in aerial views, after which she began flying in commercial airliners to study cloud formations and weather patterns. She soon started sketching and painting the landscape as seen from above, beginning a process that has developed into a defining element of her art. Her first nocturnal painting...

William Sharp (1900 - 1961) Factory on the River Oil on canvas 17 1/2 x 23 1/4 inches Initialed lower right: WS Provenance: Estate of the artist Private Collection, New York Swann Auction Galleries, American Art, June 13, 2019, Lot 178 William Sharp was born on June 13, 1900, in Lemberg, Austria, where he attended college and the Academy for Arts and Industry. He later studied in Kraków, Poland, and in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Sharp began his career as a designer of stained-glass windows and as a painter of murals. He served in the German army during World War I. After the war he became a newspaper artist in Berlin and a well-known etcher. Sharp drew political cartoons that were bitterly critical of the growing Nazi movement. As the influence of National Socialism intensified, he began to contribute drawings, under a pseudonym, to publications that were hostile to Hitler. After Hitler assumed power, Sharp was confronted with these drawings and told that he would be sent to a concentration camp. However, in 1934, he escaped to the United States. His first newspaper assignment in America was making courtroom sketches for The New York Mirror...

Susan Tunick (American, b. 1946) Speedy Run #1, 1983 Oil on canvas 62 1/2 x 10 3/4 inches Signed and dated on the reverse Susan Tunick, artist and Presid...

Emanuel Buckvar (American, b. 1980) Peonies, 2011 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches Signed, titled and dated on the reverse Provenance: The artist Private Collection, Long Island, 2011 contemporary AbEx artist Emanuel Buckvar successfully refutes the idea that there is nothing left to explore with drip or splatter paintings. Buckvar explores ideas of space and volume in his work. He frequently "paints in the dark" so as to focus on the process of creation as opposed to the thing created. From the time he was a child, Emanual Buckvar loved, collected, studied and sold art purchased from estates, so for Christmas 2010, his wife bought him a batch of paint, stretched canvases, brushes. Then she had to nag him for months to give it a shot. Finally, he gave did, deciding to do some action paintings (outside at dusk in his driveway). To his astonishment, he sold several to customers for thousands of dollars each. His first and best selling paintings...

Lily Harmon (1912 - 1998) Woman with Rose Ink and gouache on board 23 x 19 inches Lily Harmon, was an artist who worked in portraiture, assemblage and book illustration, and whose ...

Juliette Gordon (American, b. 1934) Untitled (Modern Woman), circa 1973 Collage on board 30 x 20 inches Provenance: Allan Stone Gallery, New York (ASG-JuG8) Sold with certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Juliette Gordon is a witty, perceptive, and highly intelligent artist. Her most iconic works are wickedly funny and sometimes highly political photocollages that were inspired by her involvement in the women’s movement of the early 1970s. At the time, she was exhibiting with the likes of Nancy Spero and May Stevens...

Frank J. Boros (1943 - 2017) Tuesday - 8 O'clock Oil on canvas 48 x 51 inches Signed lower right Accompanied by original purchase invoice and letter from the artist. Provenance: T...

Vlaho Bukovac (Croatian, 1855 - 1922) Portrait of a Lady Oil on canvas 18 1/2 x 15 inches Signed left middle Provenance: Private Collection Toronto Kuns...

Jules Herve (French, 1887 - 1981) Entre Acte - Ballerinas at the Opera Oil on canvasboard 10 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, Palm Beach, Florida...

Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831 - 1915) A Quiet Afternoon, 1876 Oil on canvas 15 1/4 x 21 inches Signed and dated lower right Born in 1831 in Boston, Enoch Wood Perry, Jr, is internati...

William Samuel Horton (1865 - 1936) La Seine Fumee bleu, Paris, France, circa 1909 Oil on canvasboard 17 x 21 inches Signed lower left A landscape painter, William Horton lived and ...

Nicolai S. Cikovsky (1894 - 1984) On the Beach Oil on panel 15 1/4 x 20 inches Signed lower right Provenance: ACA Galleries, New York

Helen M. Goodwin (1865 - 1955) Nantucket, Massachusetts Oil on canvas laid on panel 12 x 16 inches Signed and titled lower right Helen M. Goodwin was born in New Castle, Indiana in ...

William Hart (1823 - 1894) Pastoral Landscape, 1877 Oil on canvas 9 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches Signed and dated lower left Born in Paisley, Scotland, William Ha...

Carl Wuermer (1900 - 1981) Late Summer, 1924 Oil on canvas 26 x 28 inches Signed and dated lower right Provenance: McColl Fine Art, North Carolina Known for serene, realistic lands...

Olive Parker Black (1868 - 1948) Verdant Summer Landscape Oil on canvas 20 x 30 inches Signed lower left An accomplished landscape painter, Olive Black ...

Walter Griffin (1861 - 1935) Eleventh Century Romance Oil on canvas 34 x 36 inches Signed lower right; signed on the reverse and titled on the stretche...

Harry Leslie Hoffman (1871 - 1964) Bermuda Oil on board 16 x 12 inches Signed lower right; estate stamped on the reverse A man with strong academic art training, Harry Hoffman was judged by his peers to have done best with his landscapes when he painted what he saw and set aside the theories. He studied in Paris, worked at Yale University with John Ferguson Weir, and was a student at the Art Students League with Frank DuMond. But Willard Metcalf had the strongest influence, encouraging Hoffman to paint in the style of impressionism. In 1902, Hoffman went to Old Lyme, Connecticut, and stayed at the Florence Griswold...

Ernest Fiene (1894 - 1965) Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches Signed lower right Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1894. As a teenager, Fiene immigrated to the United States in 1912. He studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1914 to 1918, taking day classes with Thomas Maynard and evening classes with Leon Kroll. Fiene continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Paris from 1916 to 1918, adding classes in printmaking at the Art Students League in 1923. Fiene began his career as an artist in 1919 with his first exhibition of watercolors at the MacDowell Club arranged by his mentor Robert Henri. In 1923 the Whitney Studio Club mounted a large exhibition of his works. The following year he had an exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, which completely sold out all fifty-two works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. With the proceeds of sales from the New Gallery exhibition, Ernest Fiene and his younger brother Paul, a sculptor, built studios in Woodstock, New York in 1925. In the early Twenties Ernest Fiene painted mostly landscapes of Woodstock and both the Ramapo and Hudson River Valleys. He was the subject of the first monograph for the Younger Artists Series in 1922. Published in Woodstock, the series went on to include Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The book reproduced 1 illustration in color and another 27 reproductions in black and white. Around 1925 Fiene became fascinated with the intensity, excitement, and opportunities for color harmonies New York City offered as a subject. His paintings shifted to urban and industrial themes with architecture, industry, and transportation becoming his subjects. By 1926 Fiene had attracted the dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who gave him a one-man exhibition that year, which travelled to the Boston Arts Club. C.W. Kraushaar Galleries gave Fiene a one-man exhibition of urban, landscape, portrait, and still life paintings in 1927. Julianna Force, the director of the Whitney Studio Club and first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, included two of Fiene's paintings in a fall exhibition in 1928. The Whitney Studio Club showed Fiene's paintings in a two-man exhibition with Glenn O. Coleman that year and acquired three of Fiene's paintings. Also in 1928 Fiene became affiliated with Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery where he had an exhibition of 20 lithographs in the spring. Fiene sold his house in Woodstock in 1928 to spend more of his time in New York City. With so many successful exhibitions, Fiene returned to Paris in 1928-29 where he rented Jules Pascin's studio and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In France, Fiene painted both landscape and urban subjects developed from ideas influenced by Cubist geometry and the use of flat areas of broad color. Upon returning to New York in 1930, Fiene used this new approach to continue to paint New York skyscraper and waterfront subjects, as well as to begin a series of paintings on changing old New York based on the excavations for Radio City Music Hall and the construction of the Empire State Building. Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries exhibited this series, titled "Changing Old New York," in 1931. Fiene also has solo exhibitions at Rehn Galleries in 1930 and 1932. Fiene's oil paintings are exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930 as well. Fiene was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans in December of 1931. Visiting New York, Henri Matisse saw the exhibition and called Fiene's Razing Buildings, West 49th Street the finest painting he had seen in New York. Fiene had two mural studies from his Mechanical Progress series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers in 1932. Fiene sent View from my Window which depicts Fiene working on a lithograph stone while looking out his window to the newly completed Empire State Building to the Carnegie International in 1931. In 1932 Fiene participated in the first Biennial of American Painting at the Whitney Museum and his prints were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Wehye Gallery. In the same year, Fiene was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to further study mural painting in Florence, Italy. On his return from Italy in 1933 Fiene re-engaged himself in New York City life and won several public and private mural projects. Fiene resumed his active exhibition schedule, participating in two group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and a one-man exhibition of recent paintings at the Downtown Gallery in January 1934. In 1933 he purchased a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, which added Connecticut scenes to his landscape subjects. This was also the year Fiene began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine, where he painted seascapes, harbor scenes, and still lifes. Fiene's landscape paintings attracted numerous commissions as part of the American Scene movement. From 1935-36 Fiene took an extended sketching trip through the urban, industrial, and farming areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Most of the twenty-four Pennsylvania urban and rural paintings from this trip were featured in an exhibition held at the First National Bank in Pittsburgh in October of 1937 by the Pittsburgh Commission for Industrial Expansion. Fiene said of these works that he formed rhythm, opportunity for space and color, and integrity in the Pennsylvania mill and furnace paintings. Fiene received the silver medal for one of the Pittsburgh paintings...

Alfred S. Wall (American, 1825-1896) Untitled (Building the Railroad), 1859 Oil on canvas 14 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches Signed and dated lower left For Christmas, 2008, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette featured Alfred Wall's painting, Old Saw Mill from the collection of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA. It was painted in 1851 in the town of Lilly, Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains. The newspaper description stated that "though the saw mill is long gone, it still conveys all the warmth and coziness of this time of year. The article, written by Patricia Lowry, continued: At first glance, Alfred S. Wall's painting of a saw mill in snowy woods triggers nostalgia for the coziness of a log cabin, the smell of a wood-burning fire and the warming of chilled hands and feet beside it. But as sentimental as it seems on the surface, Mr. Wall's painting has a deeper and unexpected context. This is more than a painting about sled-riding children and early industry planted in the middle of virgin forest. Intended or not, this is a painting about conquering the great divide of the Allegheny Mountains. For the third consecutive year, the Post-Gazette features a winter-scene painting on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. This year's painting, Old Saw Mill, was selected by co-publisher and editor-in-chief John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman during a visit to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Mr. Wall, listed as a portrait painter in the 1850 census, was about 26 when he painted Old Saw Mill in 1851. The self-taught artist was born in Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County, to William and Lucy Wall, who'd emigrated from England around 1820. An artistic sensibility ran in the family: William was a sculptor who carved ornate tombstones here; Alfred's children, A. Bryan and Bessie, were landscape painters, as was Alfred's older brother, William Coventry Wall. For more than a century the Walls formed a prominent art dynasty in Pittsburgh, and Alfred, eventually a partner in the city's most prestigious art gallery, was well known as a painter, dealer and restorer. In Old Saw Mill, two wood cutters, each holding an axe, meet outside the mill; one points in the direction of the forest. On the other side of the stream, one child pulls another down the hillside on a sled. Just behind the hill's slope, the roof of a building appears, perhaps the home of the sawyer. The luminous, late afternoon light comes from the northwest, casting lengthening shadows on the snow under a darkening sky. The saw mill in "Old Saw Mill" likely would have been impossible to track down had Mr. Wall, presumably, not written on the back of the painting: "old saw mill near Jct. 4, Portage RR, Pa." "There was no Junction 4," said Mike Garcia, park ranger at the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh near Gallitzen, Cambria County. "But there was an Inclined Plane No. 4 at Lilly, and there was a saw mill there." In fact, there were at least six saw mills at Lilly over the years, said longtime resident Jim Salony, president of the Lilly-Washington Historical Society. But when he saw an image of the painting, Mr. Salony had no trouble coming up with a location. While there are no known photographs of the saw mill, he believes it stood near the intersection of Portage and Washington streets, next to Bear Rock Run. Mr. Salony, retired academic dean at Mount Aloysius College, didn't know exactly when the mill was torn down, but it's been gone since at least the late 1800s. He was pleased to learn of the painting, even though that knowledge came too late for inclusion in a new book about Lilly, The Spirit of a Community, for which he served as primary author and editor. It runs to more than 700 pages. For a little town -- population 869 last year -- Lilly has a lot of history. Nestled in a bowl on the western slope of the Allegheny Mountains about 3 miles south of Cresson, Lilly was first settled in 1806 by Joseph Meyer and his family, who named their 332-acre land patent Dundee. Although the Meyers had left by 1811, other settlers followed, but the community didn't flourish until the 1830s, when the Allegheny Portage Railroad began its 23-year-run through the town. For 200 years the Alleghenies had stood as an impediment to trade and travel between Pittsburgh and the east. A canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh would change that and compete with New York's Erie Canal. But a portage railroad would have to be built, on which teams of horses would lead the canal boats over the mountains. Engineer Sylvester Welch began his surveying from the small settlement at Lilly. The railroad would require 10 inclined planes, some quite steep, between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. To build it, trees had to be cut along a 120-foot-wide right-of-way for 36 miles, along which track and engine houses had to be built. William Brown, who owned the saw mill on Bear Rock Run, built at least one of the engine houses at Inclined Plane No. 4; an 1834 contract also included fencing the dwelling lots at the head and foot of the plane. Lilly is located at what was the foot of Inclined Plane No. 4., giving the community one of its early informal names, Foot of Four. Named in 1883 for Richard Lilly, who'd completed the grist mill there, Lilly had another early name: Hemlock, so dubbed by a Portage Railroad traveler who smelled the bark stripped from the trees at the saw mill. Because there isn't another Allegheny Portage Railroad location like it, where a cut in the mountains opens into a bowl, Mr. Salony thinks it was Lilly that Charles Dickens wrote about following his trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Canal in late March 1842, describing what he saw after emerging from "the bottom of the cut": "It was very pretty while traveling, to look down into a valley full of light and softness, catching glimpses through the tree-tops of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, who we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homeward; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind." To get to Lilly, Mr. Wall may have taken the Pennsylvania Canal from his home in Allegheny City, now the North Side. He'd married young, at 21, to Sarah Carr in 1846, the same year he began his career as an artist. By 1880 they were living in a brick townhouse at 104 (later 814) Arch St., now demolished. Across the river in Pittsburgh he shared a studio at 67 Fourth Ave. with his brother William; they later moved to Burke's Building, today the city's oldest office building at 209-211 Fourth. But often they worked outdoors, sometimes as part of the colony of artists that grew up around painter George Hetzel beginning in the late 1860s at Scalp Level...

James Brade Sword (1839 - 1915) Couple in the Field Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches Signed lower left After a childhood in Macao, China, James Brade Sword started out in life, after hi...

Henry Ward Ranger (1858 - 1915) Stony Cove and Headland, 1910 Oil on canvas 28 x 36 inches Signed lower right Provenance: McDonough Gallery, New York William Macbeth Galleries, New York American Art Association, The Completed Pictures Left by the Late Henry Ward Ranger, 1917, Lot 72 A key person in the establishment of the Old Lyme, Connecticut art colony in 1899, Henry Ward Ranger is regarded as the leader of the Tonalist movement in America and was a leading painter in this country in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. He was born in Geneseo and raised in Syracuse, New York, and in 1873, enrolled in the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University, where his father was a professor of photography and drawing. Two years later, he became a re-toucher of paintings in his father's studio and did not earn a college degree. He also spent much time in New York City, where he was a writer of music criticism and visited galleries, where he had his first exposure to French Barbizon painting...

Kathleen E. Figgis (British, 1904-1939) Lady at the Piano Oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches Signed and dated lower right Kathleen E. Figgis was born in 1875 and died in 1960. She exhibi...

William Edward Norton (1843 - 1916) Ship Portrait, 1876 Oil on canvas 10 x 16 inches Signed and dated lower left Born in Boston, William Norton became a noted marine painter, stirred by his youth when he sailed on family-owned ships. He studied at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and with George Inness, and then established a studio in Boston. In the early 1870s, he went to Paris and became a student with Chevreuse and A. Vollon, and then he settled in London where he exhibited throughout the last quarter of the 19th century. His reputation there was based on his scenes of the Thames River, and ocean and coastal views. In 1901, he and his wife returned to the United States and settled in New York City. He also painted at Monhegan Island, Maine, where a treacherous ledge on the southern side of the island is named "Norton's Ledge" for him. He was a member of the Boston Art Club with whom he exhibited from 1873 to 1909. He also exhibited with the Pennsylvania Academy, the Royal Academy in London, the Paris Salon, the 1893 Chicago Exposition...

Anthony Thieme (1888 - 1954) Main Street, Rockport Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Signed lower right 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...

Bruce Crane (1857 - 1937) November Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Signed lower right Robert Bruce Crane was an American painter. He joined the Lyme Art Colony in the early 1900s. His ...

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...

Howard Everett Giles (1876 - 1955) MacMahan's Maine Oil on canvas backed with board 30 x 30 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Art Institute of Chicago Christie's New York, December 8, 2011, Lot 2 Howard Giles spent most of his career in New York City, where he was an educator, magazine illustrator, and painter who espoused the theory of Dynamic Symmetry. He was born in Brooklyn, and as a young man worked in a New York railroad office. Financial support of a family friend allowed him to study at the Art Students League with H. Siddons Mowbray. In early 1910, he became an illustrator for Scribner's Magazine, and in 1912, on sketching assignment for Scribner's went to England. During World War I, he did illustration for Harper's Monthly Magazine, and many of his images were 'roaring twenties' genre and figure paintings. In 1912, he began teaching life classes at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (later Parsons School of Design), and remained there until the late 1920s. During that time, he was also a part-time instructor at the Childs-Walker School in Boston, and accepted numerous invitations to lecture including at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Arts and Wellesley College. His initial painting style was Impressionism, but he grew increasingly interested in other scientific, aesthetic theories. He worked with Jay Hambridge from 1916 to 1919, applying Hambridge's theory of Dynamic Symmetry to his painting and his lecture topics. From 1922 to 1926, Giles also worked with and was influenced in his own painting by colorist theorist Denman Ross, who espoused a limited and related color palette. For many of his paintings, Giles used watercolor although he also painted in oil and pastels. During the last years before his retirement when he moved to Woodstock...

George Henry Leonard, Jr. (1869 - 1928) La Marre de Soire Oil on canvas 15 x 21 3/4 inches Signed lower right A landscape painter--primarily using a late impressionist loose stroke as his main mode of expression--Leonard drew not only upon French influences, but also the American school of impressionism characterized by Frank Boggs...

Alexander Bower (1875 - 1952) Portland Harbor, Maine, 1910 Oil on canvas 27 x 33 inches Signed and dated lower right An American Impressionist, Alexande Bower was born in New York, studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and was living with his wife in Cliff Island, Maine by 1914. Despite his urban upbringing, the coast and the sea fascinated Bower. A large portion of his paintings are seascapes, particularly scenes depicting the coast of Cape Elizabeth...

Harold C. Dunbar (1882 - 1953) Meadow Landscape in Summer, 1929 Oil on canvas 17 1/2 x 21 inches Signed and dated lower left Harold C. Dunbar — painter, teacher, writer, and illustrator — was born in Brockton, MA on December 8, 1882. He resided in Chatham, MA and died in 1953. His work includes portraits, landscapes, street scenes, still lifes, harbors and coastal scenes. Dunbar studied with Ernest Lee Major (1864-1950) and Joseph De Camp...

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...

Gustav (Gustave) Wolff (1863 - 1935) View of New York Harbor from the Staten Island Ferry Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches Signed lower right In the Autumn of 1913, the German Associati...

Ernest Albert (1857 - 1946) Maine Coast, Ogunquit, 1937 Oil on canvasboard 18 x 20 inches Signed and dated lower right; titled on a label on the reverse A distinguished theatrical and scenic designer who also became a landscape painter and muralist, Ernest Albert worked in New York, St. Louis, and Chicago. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1857, and showing early talent, received the Graham Art...

Carle John Blenner (1862 - 1952) Pont Neuf, Seine, Paris, France, 1887 Oil on canvas 15 x 22 inches Signed and dated lower right; titled lower left ...

Harrison Bird Brown (1831 - 1915) Grand Manan Oil on canvas 12 x 20 inches Signed with initials lower left Harrison Bird Brown was born in 1831 in Portland, Maine, and is best known for his White Mountain landscapes and marine paintings of Maine's Casco Bay...

Frederic Milton Grant (1886 - 1959) Low Tide, 1916 Oil on canvas 16 1/4 x 18 1/8 inches Signed and dated lower right Housed in a Stanford White Newcomb-Macklin frame. Exhibitied: Ar...

Alexander Bower (1875 - 1952) Reflections, Motif No. 1, Rockport, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches Signed lower right; titled on the stretcher An American Impressionist, Alexande Bower was born in New York, studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and was living with his wife in Cliff Island, Maine by 1914. Despite his urban upbringing, the coast and the sea fascinated Bower. A large portion of his paintings are seascapes, particularly scenes depicting the coast of Cape Elizabeth...

Harry Leith-Ross (1886 - 1973) Fisherman of Yankee Cove Oil on canvasboard 8 1/8 x 10 1/2 inches Signed lower left; also with artist, title, and number '39' on label verso Provenance: Private Collection, Pennsylvania Landscape painter Harry Leith-Ross was born in Mauritius in 1886, a British possession in the Indian Ocean. He came to America as a seventeen year old. Before beginning, some ten years later in 1914, his studies at the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, New York at the relatively late age of twenty-eight, Leith-Ross had worked as a commercial artist. He studied with John F. Carlson and Birge Harrison at the League Summer School, and later with C. Y. Turner at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He then went to Paris, studying with Jean Paul Laurens at the Academie Julien and in England with Stanhope Forbes. Long associated with the Bucks County artists' colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Leith-Ross may have first gone there in 1912. It is definitely known that he visited the area in 1916 at the invitation of a student he had met when both attended the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, John Fulton Folinsbee. Birge Harrison, his former instructor at the League, whom he met again, was also there in New Hope during the winters from 1914 to 1916. The third and last generation of the New Hope colony would be comprised of artists like Leith-Ross, Folinsbee and Kenneth R. Nunamaker. It is somewhat ironic that Leith-Ross, so long affiliated with the New Hope School of American Impressionism...

Henry Ryan MacGinnis (1875 - 1962) Road to Provincetown, 1924 Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Signed lower right; titled and dated on the stretcher Housed in a Stanford White Newcomb-Macklin frame. Exhibited: Trenton, New Jersey, School of Industrial Arts Provincetown by Professor MacGinnis, 1924. Henry Ryan MacGinnis, 1875-1962, was born in Indiana and began his art studies under the eminent Hoosier artists T.C. Steele, J.O. Adams and William Forsyth. One of his earliest exhibitions was in 1896, when he showed his work with other notable Hoosier artists such as T.C. Steele, J. Ottis Adams...

Henriette Amiard Oberteuffer (1878 - 1962) Low Tide - Brittany, France Oil on canvasboard 18 x 21 1/2 inches Signed lower right Painter, printmaker, and teacher Henriette Amiard Oberteuffer (1878-1962) was born in Le Havre, France and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. She moved with her husband and fellow artist George Oberteuffer...

Olive Parker Black (1868 - 1948) Verdant Landscape with Stream Oil on canvas 16 x 24 inches Signed lower left n accomplished landscape painter, Olive Bl...

George Henry Smillie (1840 - 1921) Stone Wall, Autumn, 1879 Oil on canvas 9 1/2 x 15 inches Signed and dated lower right Provenance: Skinner, Boston, September 19, 2014, Lot 389 The career of George Smillie (1840-1921) followed the arc of nineteenth-century U.S. landscape painting. Trained in the Hudson River School tradition, Smillie successfully adapted to changing U.S. tastes and growing interest in European trends. In the late 1800s, he moved to tonalist paintings full of brushwork and influenced by French Barbizon painting. By the end of his career, he had lightened his palette to produce works similar to those of the U.S. impressionists. Yet in all styles, he was never less than competent, and his tonalist work is among the best produced in the United States. Like many nineteenth-century painters, George Smillie’s artistic training began with the study of printing. His father, James Smillie...

Jules Herve (French, 1887 - 1981) Bassin des Tuilleries and the Louvre, Paris, n.d. Oil on canvas 18 1/2 x 21 3/4 inches Signed lower left; signed on the reverse Provenance: Dominio...

Jules Herve (French, 1887 - 1981) Place Jeanne D'Arc, Paris, circa 1930 Oil on canvas 8 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches Signed lower right; signed on the reverse Jules Rene Herve, an impression...

Paul Greene (1925 - 2020) Berkshire Hills Landscape, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 50 x 97 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Private Collection, Great Barrington...

Thomas Pradzynski (1951 - 2007) Montmartre Street Scene, Paris, France Oil on canvas 16 x 32 inches Signed lower right At the age of 26 Thomas Prad...

Franz Priking (1927 - 1979) Cityscape in France, n.d. Oil on canvas 46 x 32 inches Signed and dated lower left Provenance: Private Collection, New York ...

Spencer Hodge (British, b. 1943) African Elephant Walking Oil on canvas 38 x 50 1/2 inches Signed lower right Spencer Hodge attended the Hastings School...

Claude Venard (French, 1913 - 1999) Venice Canal, Italy, circa 1950-55 Oil on canvas 24 x 24 inches Signed lower center Provenance: Private Collection, Massachusetts The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Galerie Felix Vercel. Claude Venard was a notable exponent of the French mid-century post-Cubist movement. He was born to bourgeois parents from Burgogne in Paris, on March 21, 1913. At the age of 17, he enrolled and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but remained for only two days, not adhering to the school's academic style. Instead, he spent the following six years at the École des Arts Appliqués, taking evening classes and embracing the contemporary Parisian art scene, all the while becoming recognized in its circles. Not able to support himself as an artist, by 1936 he found employment as a restorer at the Louvre, further honing his artistic skills. Paris of the period was dominated by an art trend that strongly favored abstraction. Following a group show at the Galerie Billet-Worms in 1935, art critic Waldemar George declared: "Let's be young again! Painting is not dead… Its course has not stopped. Forces Nouvelles is born." Venard contributed and initially adhered to the strict disciplines of the Forces Nouvelle group. But as with many of his fellow members, he soon abandoned it seeking individual expression. Following WWII, Venard rekindled friendships with past Forces Nouvelles members, joining Pierre Tal-Coat, André Marchand, André Civet...