Sanford Robinson Gifford

A Sketch of Derwentwater

1855

Monogrammed and dated lower right: TMORAN. 1919.

Signed lower left: R. Gignoux

Monogrammed lower right: AB

Signed indistinctly lower right

Signed lower right in arrowhead: R A Blakelock; on verso: A Spring Garden

Signed lower right: JR Brevoort

Autumn Idle, Catskills, New York, October 23, 1885 By. Jervis McEntee (American, 1828-1891) Unframed: 11.5" x 16" Framed: 20.5" x 25" Jervis McEntee was a landscape painter, born in 1828 in the Hudson River Valley in Rondout, New York. It was said that 'Nostalgia may well have been McEntee's middle name", and that he, always attempting to stir emotions in his viewers, often attached poetry to his paintings when exhibiting them. At a time when the Civil War and its after effects caused great disruption in America, McEntee's work may have provided a visual escape for the more educated. His works are rich with the colors of autumn and winter, and he, who often painted in the Catskill Mountains, preferred smaller views rather than panoramas. Usually detailed and simple, his works often reflect a sense of loneliness. As a youngster, McEntee would play in his parents attic, pretending it was an art studio. An unsuccessful attempt at business led McEntee back into the art profession where he studied in New York City under the influence of Frederic E. Church, master of the Hudson River Style, and soon had a showing of his own in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building by 1855. In about 1858, Mr. and Mrs. McEntee hired English architect Calvert Vaux to build a studio next to McEntee's fathers house in Rondout. There Jervis would spend most of his summers, painting the nearby Catskill Mountains, and returning to the city during the winter. At the outbreak of the Civil War, McEntee enlisted in the Union...

Signed lower left. Most noted for his paintings of forest interiors, Roswell Shurtleff settled in Hartford, Connecticut but spent his summers painting his signature works in the Adirondacks at Keene Valley, New York. He and John Lee Fitch successfully encouraged other artists to join them including Winslow Homer, J Alden Weir, James Smillie...

Charming Hudson River school antique oil painting of a sailboat on a lake, circa 1880-90. Signed "R. Labarr." after Richard LaBarre Goodwin...

A fine large landscape of a New England farm with cows, stone arch bridge, farmhouse and barns by American artist John White Allen Scott (1815-1907). Scott was born in Roxbury, MA and apprenticed with lithographer William Pendleton and later worked with Fitz Henry Lane...

John Frederick Kensett White House and Trees, circa 1853 Oil and gouache on paper 6 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches Provenance: Estate of Vincent Colyer (1824 - 1888) By descent Paul Magriel Collection Private Collection, Long Island Exhibited: New York, The Finch College Museum of Art; Southampton, New York, The Parrish Art Museum; New Orleans, Louisiana, Isaac Delgado Museum of Art; Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk Museum of Art; Montclair, New Jersey, Montclair Art Museum; New London, Connecticut, Lyman Allyn Museum; Manchester, New Hampshire, The Currier Gallery of Art; Providence, Rhode Island, Rhode Island School of Design; Youngstown, Ohio, The Butler Institute of American Art, American Drawings (Benjamin West to the present) from the Paul Magriel Collection, June 1961 - December 1962. Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, April 14 - May 15, 1963. Boston International Fine Art Show at the Cyclorama, Lincoln Glenn, October 19 - 23, 2022. In the 1850s through 1860, John Frederick Kensett, painted a series of at least five landscapes of the "Shrewsbury River" (now the Navesink River) along the New Jersey shore. Art historians have described Kensett’s paintings of the river as having evolved from a trip in the fall of 1853 at the invitation of Kensett's friend, author and lecturer George Curtis. However, letters viewable at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website make it clear that Kensett had become acquainted with the area over a year earlier, most likely in connection with fellow artist and friend Thomas Prichard Rossiter. Kensett and Rossiter had been friends since at least the 1830s. As aspiring artists, they had traveled to Europe together in the 1840s. In 1851 Rossiter married Anna Ehrick Parmly, then in her early 20s, and Kensett attended the wedding. Anna was one of four daughters of Eleazer and Anna Maria Parmly. Eleazer, one of the major figures in American dentistry history, was a wealthy and accomplished member of New York society. When not in the city, the Parmly family gathered at Bingham Place, a sprawling estate on 275 pastoral acres spanning the peninsula between the Shrewsbury and Navesink Rivers along the New Jersey shore. The Bingham Place estate encompassed much of what is now Rumson, then known as Oceanic, N.J. It was a wide-open landscape of ocean views, orchards, lawns, and cattle-dotted pastures. There the Parmlys opened their doors to family, friends, and the summer breeze. Rossiter, newly-married into the Parmly family, was likely the reason that Kensett paid a social visit to Bingham Place in the summer of 1852. On July 11, 1852, having reluctantly departed, Kensett wrote Rossiter who was still at Bingham Place: New York to me now is that of a deserted place…marking a dismal contrast to the green lawns at Bingham Place. I saw the receding shores of Shrewsbury & the line of dust which marked your homeward course & finally the last glimpse of the Locust trees that shade the pleasant mansion & happy inmates at Bingham with any thing but a joyous spirit. A major figure in the American luminist tradition and one of the most renowned painters of the Civil War era, John Frederick Kensett was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1816. He was the son of Thomas Kensett, a British immigrant engraver, and it was in his father's New Haven firm that Kensett first learned to draw. After mastering the rudiments of the graphic arts, he worked as an engraver in print shops in New Haven, Albany, and New York throughout the 1830's. During this period, he began to paint on his own, encouraged by a friend and fellow artist, John W. Casilear. In 1838, he made his first submission, a landscape, to the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design. Desirous of continuing his training, Kensett traveled to Europe in 1840. For the next seven years, often in the company of artists such as Casilear and Asher B...

Tower of Babel, Colorado Canyon 12 ⅞" x 14 ½" 20 ¾" x 22 ¾" x 4 ¼" framed Verso sketch of fall trees on a hillside. Provenance: The estate of Samuel Colman. Purchased by private c...