Catalog: Sold Items: Fine Art (179)

Biography

James Waltham Curtis (1839-1901) was an eminent Australian colonial artist whose work lives on as a tribute to Australia’s early days of European settlement. His approach is of technical, poetic and historical interest, emphasizing man’s battle with a primeval landscape and nature, his picturesque landscapes being fine examples of the late 19th century period which preceded the Heidelberg School. Curtis was an English painter and illustrator who it is believed, came to Australia during the Gold Rush. Curtis’ work plays an important part in the preservation of Australian history and is an excellent reminder of how life was in the latter part of the 19th century.

The Three Sisters

The Sisters were formed by erosion. The soft sandstone of the Blue Mountains is easily eroded over time by wind, rain and rivers and the cliffs surrounding the Jamison Valley are being slowly broken up. [edit]Aboriginal legends The commonly told legend of the Three Sisters is that three sisters (Meehni', 'Wimlah' and Gunnedoo') lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe). They fell in love with three men from a neighbouring tribe (the Nepean tribe), but marriage was forbidden by tribal law. The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters. A major tribal battle ensued, and the sisters were turned to stone by an elder to protect them, but he was killed in the fighting and no one else could turn them back. This legend is claimed to be an Indigenous Australian Dreamtime legend.[1] However, Dr Martin Thomas, in his work "The artificial horizon: imagining the Blue Mountains",[2] clearly shows that the "aboriginal" legend is a fabrication created by a non-Aboriginal local Katoomba, Mel Ward, presumably to add interest to a local landmark. The story originated in the late 1920s or early 1930s and is unknown prior to that date. The Aboriginal traditional owners, the Gundungurra, have a legend that includes the Sisters rock formation. They are currently[when?] developing a website which will include these traditional stories.

Biography

Born in 1936 in Yugoslavia, Stupar chose France as his permanent home in 1964 after completing his studies at the Beaux-Arts of Belgrade. Today we find that the art of Marko Stupar is totally integrated into the School of Paris. Although his work continues to be very personal, the graphic nature of his Slavic background is now uniquely combined with the subtlety found in Bonnard.Stupar has participated in juried exhibitions since 1966 when he won the Silver Medal at the Center of Diffusion of the Cote-d’Azur. He regularly participates in the Salon d’Automne, the Salon National des Beaux-Arts, the Salon des Artistes Français, and the Salon Comparaison. Among his other honors, Stupar has won both the Silver and Gold medals of the prestigious Salon des Artistes Français. One-man exhibitions of Stupar’s work have been held in cities all over the world including Paris, Geneva, Lyon, Osaka, Dusseldorf, Strasbourg, Zagreb, Annecy, Havre, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Houston.

Biography

Born in Ogdenburg, Germany, Henry Raschen became one of America's leading painters of Indian portraits and figures in the 19th and early 20th centuries and was the first California artist to be committed to Indian themes. He also painted still lifes and landscapes, the latter with skillful play of light and shadow. In 1868, he and his family emigrated to Fort Ross, California where they spent one year and then settled in San Francisco. He took early art lessons at the San Francisco Art Association under Charles Nahl and Virgil Williams and also studied with noted figure painter of altar pieces, Joseph Harrington. Feeling the need for more extensive training, he went to Munich in the late 1870s and became part of the numerous California artists then studying in Munich at that time. There he became friends and a painting companion of William Merritt Chase, and he also traveled in Italy and France. In 1883, he settled in San Francisco and for the next eight years went with landscape painter Carl Von Perbandt on excursions among Indian tribes of California and the Southwest, and he gained much attention for the life-like quality of his paintings. From 1890 to 1894, he lived and had his studio in Munich where he was a successful painter and teacher, and after returning to San Francisco, won the gold medal at the Munich Exposition of 1898. He went on an expedition with Army General Nelson A. Miles when Miles and his troops captured Apache Chief Geronimo at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, 30 miles northeast of Douglas. Many years later in Oklahoma, Raschen sketched Geronimo whom he visited in prison at Fort Sill. In the early 20th century, a key person in establishing Raschen as a major artist in San Francisco was Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, mother of publisher William Randolph Hearst. In 1906, damage from the earthquake and fire caused him to move across the bay to Oakland where he painted until his death in 1937. Source: Edan Hughes,

Biography

Sioma Lifshitz arrived in Shanghai on a freighter from Vladivostock in 1922. The 20 years old energetic Russian jew had no money but lot’s of dreams and soon started to work in a photography studio under the name of Sam Sanzetti. It took him 5 years to open in own studio in 1927, becoming one of the most famous photographer in Shanghai. The studio was first located on 73 Nanking Road (today 73 Nanjing Dong Lu), near the Bund and just behind the Palace hotel (today Swatch Art Peace Hotel). Construction on the Cathay Hotel (today Peace Hotel) was on-going at that time very and the opening in 1929 certainly also helped his business. The central position in the business center allowed him to become the photographer of the rich and famous in Shanghai, surely meeting with other successful business people of the time. His office later moved to 39 Peking Road (today Beijing Dong Lu) as reported in 1938 Shanghai Dollar Directory. Some of his photographs clearly remind of the calendar ads from the Carl Crowe company located very close on 81 JinKe lu and both men hanging around in similar circles probably worked with each other at some point. Sam Sanzetti left Shanghai in 1957 to immigrate to Israel leaving a Chinese wife and a stepdaughter behind and remade his life in his new country. He had fun memories of Shanghai as explained in an interview with an Israeli Newspaper years later. However he was never able to come back to Shanghai before his death in 1986.

Biography

Carl Henrik Jonnevold (1856-1955) was born in Norway on June 1, 1856. He immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and is known to have painted in the Northwest before moving to California in 1887. Settling in San Francisco, he maintained a studio at 1617 California Street. He was a self-taught painter except for brief study in the galleries of Paris in 1908. While in France, he was greatly influenced by the Barbizon painters and their dark palette. Returning to California, he continued to paint the beauty of northern California in the Barbizon style. Often working in late afternoon when shadow prevails, he produced hundreds of attractive tree and meadow scenes which he exhibited in local galleries. By the time of the stock market crash in 1929, Jonnevold was poverty stricken and living alone at his small studio at 560 Kearny Street. In that year he was sentenced to two months in jail for aiming a gun at his landlord. Jonnevold disappeared from San Francisco about 1930. A letter at the Oakland Museum gives his date of death as June 9, 1955 but does not state where. Member: San Francisco Art Ass'n. Exhibited: Alaska-Yukon Expo (Seattle), 1909 (bronze medal); California State Fairs (premiums). Works held: Oakland Museum; California Historical Society; De Young Museum. Courtesy Edan Hughes

A painting Sunset Glow Mt. Hood sold for $12,000 at Santa Fe Art auction 11/14/1998 lot no. 121

Biography

Born in Bangor, Maine, James Everett Stuart became known for his panoramic landscapes from Maine to California to Alaska to the Panama Canal, but especially of the American West with focus on Northern California and Oregon. Reportedly he painted more than 5000 paintings during his lifetime and originated a method of painting on aluminum and wood with a special adhering process that he thought made his work quite durable but proved not to be so. He also wrote on the back of most of his paintings His parents took him to California at the age of eight, and the family settled in San Francisco where he attended the public schools and studied art with Virgil Williams, Raymond Yelland, Thomas Hill, and William Keith at the San Francisco School of Design. His early work was dramatic California landscape including the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and in style the works were moody and mysterious and suggestive of the French Barbizon School. He first traveled to the Northwest in 1876, and in 1881, he opened his studio in Portland, Oregon and from there traveled throughout the West and East Coast and into Mexico. Subjects included Yosemite as well as California missions and adobes. He painted landscapes whose sales ultimately were financially remunerative and which established his reputation. Of those years, he expressed that he much preferred being in the park to studio painting, but he stopped visiting in 1889 and instead traveled to Alaska and the Coastal Range. During much of the 1890s, he lived in Chicago, but in 1912 returned to San Francisco until his death in 1941. There, from his studio near Union Square, he was highly successful and popular among his peers, underscored by his membership in the Bohemian Club. Many of the owners of old homes in California have his paintings on the wall, suggestive of a time of grandeur. One of his paintings is in the White House, and his work is in the historical societies of Oregon, Washington, and Montana.

Artists Biography,

Born in Denver, CO on Aug. 7, 1897, Curtis was a resident of Seattle before moving to Los Angeles in 1914. He was inspired to become an artist by his teacher Rob Wagner at Manual Arts High School. After working as a bank teller and serving in WWI, he soon was able to support himself as an illustrator. He served as official artist of the U.S. Antarctica Expedition in 1939-40 and again in 1957. About 1960 he changed his residence from Los Angeles to Twenty Nine Palms, California, with summers in Moose, Wyoming. An avid mountain climber, his studio in the Grand Tetons was a rustic log cabin. In 1972 he moved to Carson City, Nevada, where he remained until his demise on March 17, 1989. He is best known for his landscapes of the High Sierra, Grand Tetons, and Antarctica. His works won dozens of medals and prizes from the early 1920s in southern California shows.

Biography

Landscape painter, illustrator. Born in Medoc, MO on January 9, 1879, Sayre worked in the lead and zinc mines and manufactured leather goods before settling on an art career. He remained a self-taught artist except for two months with J. Laurie Wallace in Omaha. His first creative job as an artist was an employee of and engraving company in Houston, TX. Ill with diphtheria, he moved to California in 1917. Traveling to California by train, he was enchanted with the Southwest desert and vowed to return which he did in 1919. For three years he lived in Arizona working for a mining company as a bookkeeper while painting in his leisure. Upon returning to California in 1922, he held his first art exhibition of 64 watercolors in San Francisco; later that year he exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In that year he moved to Los Angeles and two years later built a home and studio in Glendale where he remained for the rest of his life. Sayre is one of California’s best known painters of the deserts and the Southwest. Member: Pallete & Chisel Club of Chicago; Painters & Sculptors of Los Angeles (cofounder and President, 1929) Exhibited: Bohemian Club, 1922; Glendale Chamber of Commerce, 1922 (solo); Glendale Public Library, 1962 (retrospective) Works Held: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Source: Hughes, Edan Milton, "Artists in California: 1786-1940," San Francisco: Hughes Publishing Company, 1989.)

Ida Sedgwick Proper (1873 - 1957)

Rare original oil on canvas by signed lower right measuring 20 x 24 inches in good all original condition. Provenance: The Grandson of the artist.

Biography

Born in Bonaparte, Iowa, into a Baptist minister family, she attended Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. Then at the Art Student's League in New York, she trained with William Merritt Chase, John Twachtmann, and Frank DuMond. In 1897, she began art studies in Munich and exhibited in European salons. From 1907 to 1911, she had a studio in New York. She is known for her Impressionist palette and diffused compositional elements.

Biography

Born in New York City, Ralph Blakelock earned a reputation for nocturnal, misty scenes, especially moonlit landscapes, large oak trees, and Indian encampments. He also did a small number of floral still lifes. His work has a mysterious quality, which some associated with the type of music he habitually played on the piano during interludes from his painting. Towards the end of his career, his paintings became increasingly haunting, a reflection of his insanity brought on by horrible poverty and his inability to support his family of nine children. He was both a late exponent of the Hudson River School of painting and also of the American West. He also foreshadowed the romantic, visionary, and modern tendencies that marked the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. This romanticism, especially of escapism, was increasingly pronounced towards the end of his career. Blakelock was the son of a prominent English-born, New York physician, and first took medical studies, but his love of music and art led him away from medicine. He graduated from the College of the City of New York, studied briefly at Cooper Union, and at the Free Academy of the City of New York. In 1867, he first exhibited at the National Academy of Design to which he was ultimately elected, after he was incarcerated for insanity. During this time, he painted a series of New York City scenes, primarily of un-glamorous areas such as his work, Shanties, New York City. He also painted in Hudson River Style and was in locations that included the Adirondacks and the White Mountain. It is thought he learned this style during his brief and only art education at Cooper Union. Primarily self taught, he declined his father's offer to pay for more extensive art schooling, and instead, at age 22, embarked on a three-year (1869-1972) horseback tour of the West. He lived with plains Indians, painting pictures of their villages, and traveled and painted through the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. In San Francisco and Oakland, he painted city scenes, the tree landscapes, and coastal views, and then he headed south to Mexico. These western paintings were also in the Hudson River style, although they were rough and more painterly. Returning to New York, he developed what became his signature expression: quiet, moody, nocturnal scenes accented with bright colors depicting light, and trees silhouetted against the sky. He had a labor-intensive technique, which was building up of multi layers of thick paint, scraping some away, and "adding more to build a complex tonality". (Zellman 420) It is said that his real travels were introspective from which he created these moody, dark landscapes, and they did not satisfy the current public taste for uplifting Hudson River style painting. Ahead of popular taste, his work was overlooked, and crooked dealers took advantage of him. With the desperation of trying to support his huge family, he sold his work cheaply. Ironically, many years after his death, his work became so valuable that forgers, including a dealer who changed the signature on canvases of Blakelock's artist daughter, Marian, to that of her father, sold paintings at very high prices by using his signature. Norman Geske, Director Emeritus of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, became the authenticator of Blakelock's work, and has seen many, many illegitimate so-called Blakelocks. Under Geske's direction, a catalogue raisonne has been published that classifies paintings with Blakelock's signature into three categories according to their degree of perceived authenticity. In 1899, the artist had a mental breakdown and spent the last twenty years of his life in an asylum in Middleton, New York. He died on August 9, 1919. However, his work had already begun increasing in value, and by 1916 was bringing as high as $20,000. Of Blakelock's career, Norman Geske wrote: "Considered in the context of American landscape painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Ralph Albert Blakelock can be seen first as a late exponent of the Hudson River School, second as a highly personal contributor to the painting of the American West, and third and most important, as part of the romantic, visionary, and modern tendencies that marked the turn of the century."(16)

Biography

Thomas Corwin Lindsay, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a well-known painter of landscapes, animal subjects and occasional portraits. He studied in Dusseldorf, Germany, in the 1860s, but lived and worked most of his life in his native city where he opened a studio in 1856 or 1857. He taught several pupils from his studio, and was a founding member of the Cincinnati Art Club, which became the Men's Art Club. Most of his landscapes were painted in Pennsylvania, up-state New York, the White Mountains of New Hampshire or other Eastern states. He exhibited at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, from 1870-83; Pogue's, in 1875; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in 1896. His work is in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Jim Lawrence, a relative of the artist, provides the following: According to the U.S. Census for 1900, Thomas Corwin Lindsay was born on July 1838 in Ohio and not 1839 as so often is recorded. In 1900, he was living in Cincinnati with his wife and son and working as an artist. His parents Thomas Lindsay and Elizabeth Lawrence were both born in Pennsylvania, his father in Cumberland County and his mother in Philadelphia.

Artist Biography Austrian sculptor was born in Vienna in 1865. His teachers were Karl Waschmann (1848-1905), known for his ivory sculptures and portrait plaquettes of contemporary celebrities, and Stefan Schwartz (1851-1924), who exhibited in Paris, including the Exposition Universelle of 1900 where he won a gold medal. Kauba’s intricate bronzes, imported to the United States between 1895 and 1912, were cast at the Roman Bronze Works. Kauba was part of the nineteenth-century tradition of polychrome bronze sculpture. There were several types of patinas on a single statue: he could render the color of buckskin, variously tinted shirts, blankets, feathers, as well as beaded moccasins. Reportedly, Kauba came to America around 1886. Inspired by the Western tales of German author Karl May, he traveled to the West and made sketches and models. Critics, however, pointed out inaccuracies of costume and other details. For instance, the guns that his “mid-nineteenth-century” figures use are models produced after 1898. Apparently he did all of his works back in Vienna. Besides the variety of color, Kauba’s bronzes show a great range of textures and his style is highly naturalistic. The sculptor loved ornament, some of which he rendered with coiled wire for reins, rope and feathers in headdresses. He successfully rendered figures in motion and often executed compositions with more than one figure. Berman (1974) illustrates non-Western subjects by Kaula, such as the pendants Where? and There (ca. 1910), a seated Scottish couple, impressive in the expressions and the details on patterned fabrics of both sitters. Another genre piece is Buster Brown, ca. 1910, and Nude on Vase shows Kauba’s versatility even further. The smooth skin contrasts with the stylistic, plant-like vase.

Richard DeTreville was born in Beaufort, South Carolina on November 17, 1864 into a prominent, old family of French ancestry. His grandfather fought with George Washington in the Revolutionary War and at the time of his birth during the Civil War, his father was Lt Governor of South Carolina. Little is known about his art training; he was possibly self-taught. In 1892 he moved to California and settled in Stockton where he established a small newspaper called Det's Magazine. Shortly after 1910 he moved from Stockton to San Francisco where he worked as a cartoonist for the Park Presidio News. In his studio on Clement Street he exhibited his paintings as well as in local department stores and art galleries. His works were handled locally by Schussler Brothers and Sanborn & Vail. The last few years of his life were spent across the bay in Alameda where he died on February 25, 1929. DeTreville worked in oil and, on rare occasions, in watercolor. He was known to be an excellent portraitist although his portraits are rare. The most prolific of early California painters, his thousands of small landscapes are invariably of the San Francisco Bay area, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and northern California. He sometimes signed his works "DeT". Member: American Art Bureau. Exhibited: White House Department Store (San Francisco), 1926 (250 oils). Works held: California Historical Society; Oakland Museum; Alameda Historical Society.

A beautiful oil of an early California landscape of wild flowers lupine and poppies. Oil painting on canvas board signed lower right measuring approx. 12 x 16 inches. Framed in a contemporary gallery frame overall 20x24 inches. In excellent condition a fine early piece would be a fine addition to any collection.

Biography

Born in Oakland, California, Ramona Froyland, known as Mona, was a painter of still lifes, portraits, landscapes, marines and later in her life, Madonnas. Her parents were Mabel and Manuel Valencia, both artists who gave Ramona her early instruction. She later attended the California School of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Ramona Valencia was a paternal descendant of General Gabriel Valencia, the first governor of Sonora, Mexico under Spanish rule, and the great granddaughter of a man who arrived in California in 1774 and became administrator of the Presidio in San Francisco where the family received many land grants. When she was six years old, in 1906, she and her family moved to San Jose because of the destruction of the San Francisco earthquake and fire. However, the family kept close ties to San Francisco where her father kept his studio. Beginning in the 1960s, Ramona Valencia taught art classes to children and adults from her studio in Castro Valley, California, and she died there on September 22, 1988. She was a member of the Hayward art Association and exhibited at Alameda County Fairs.