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Biography
A painter known for mixed-media abstractions, Alexander Nepote was born on a ranch in California near Stockton. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, at Mills College, and at the University of California from where he received a Master's Degree. From 1945 to 1950, he was Dean of the Faculty at the California College of Arts and Crafts and served in the same capacity at San Francisco State College from 1950 to 1977. Memberships included the West Coast Watercolor Society, the Bay Region Art Association, and the California Watercolor Society.Source: Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
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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 in Brooklyn, New York, and also did a lot of painting in Colerain, Massachusetts. Among the collections where his work can be found is the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences; the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Fleischer Museum in Scottsdale, Arizona. Associations he was a member of include the National Academy of Design, the National Arts Club, the Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lotos, Century, and Salmagundi Clubs. He was also a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and the Union Internationale des Beaux Arts et des Lettres. He painted entirely out-of-doors, frequently working in Arizona, doing desert landscape and the Grand Canyon views, but he is best known for his New England snow scenes, especially of the Berkshire Mountains. He died in Hillside, New Jersey in 1930.
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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)
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A leading member of the avant-garde symbolist artists in Chicago, Claude Buck moved there from his birth place of New York City in 1919. He was known for his "fantastic, sometimes disturbing images with allegorical and literary themes" (Kennedy 97) drawn from writings of Edgar Allen Poe, operas by Richard Wagner, classical mythology and New Testament writings from the Bible. Some of these early paintings had nude figures rendered in classical style to express abstract themes developed through dream-like landscapes and disregard of relative scale or relatedness between the figures. These paintings had luminist elements achieved with light-toned paints worked with transparent glazes. In the 1920s to earn money by gaining public favor and also expressing his increasing disdain for modernism, Buck did a number of "hyper-real" portraits, figures and still lifes. These proved popular and aligned him with the opponents of abstraction and their "Sanity in Art" movement whose headquarters were in Chicago. Buck taught drawing and painting at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art from 1921 to 1926, and at the Art Institute, where he took over classes of George Bellows. In New York City before coming to Chicago, Buck had a reputation as a radical artist. He took his first art training from his father, William R. Buck, from the time he was ages three to fourteen, and then until he was twenty-two, he studied at the National Academy of Design where he was nicknamed "Kid Hassam" because his painting reminded viewers of that of Claude Hassam. Buck worked as a scene painter in the theatre and at the Willet Stained Glass company, and in 1914 began portrait commissions to earn money. In New York he founded a group named the Introspectives, which reflected his own problems with melancholy during that period. Members, holding their first exhibition at the Whitney Studio in 1917, were artists who expressed their personal feelings and experiences and included Raymond Jonson and Emil Armin. In this phase of his career, Buck was focused on Old World styles of Leonardo da Vinci, Ralph Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder. In 1929, the Arts Council of New York voted him one of the top one-hundred painters in the United States. In 1949, Buck and his wife, Leslie, moved to California to a studio-home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and ten years later they settled in Santa Barbara where he died on August 4, 1974. In California, he was a member of the Carmel Art Association, the Santa Cruz Art League that he served as President in 1953,and the Santa Barbara Art Association. His paintings are in the collections of the Santa Cruz Public Library; the Santa Cruz City Museum as well as the Spencer Museum in Lawrence, Kansas; the Brigham Young University Museum; and the Museum of Elgin, Illinois.
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A painter of realistic landscapes reflecting a vanishing wilderness in America, Robert Wood (not to be confused with Robert E Wood) is reportedly one of the most mass-produced artists in the United States. His painting became so popular he was unable to meet all of the demands, and many of his works were reproduced in lithographs and mass distributed as prints, place mats, and wall murals by companies including Sears, Roebuck. He was born in Sandgate, Kent on the south coast of England near Dover, the son of W.L. Wood, a famous home and church painter who recognized and supported his son's talent. In fact, he forced his son to paint by keeping him inside to paint rather than playing with his friends. At age 12, Wood entered the South Kensington School of Art. As a youth, he came to the United States in 1910, having served in the Royal Army, and he never returned to England. He traveled extensively all over the United States, especially in the West, often in freight cars, and also painted in Mexico and Canada. His itinerant existence took him to Illinois where he worked as a farmhand, to Pensacola, Florida where he married, briefly in Ohion, Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. In 1912, he was in Los Angeles, and In the late 1920s and early 1930s, in San Antonio, Texas, where he lived and in 1928 exhibited in the "Texas Wildflower Competition." From San Antonio, he gained a national reputation for his strong colored, dramatic paintings. Some of that prestige has been credited to his asssociation with Jose Arpa, prominent Texas artist. Wood also gave art lessons, and one of his students was Porfirio Salinas. During this period, Wood sometimes signed his paintings G. Day or Trebor, which is Robert spelled backwards. In 1941 he went to California and painted numerous desert and mountain landscapes and coastal scenes. He lived in Carmel for seven years, and then moved to Woodstock, New York, but he soon returned to California, settling first in Laguna Beach, then San Diego, and finally in the High Sierras, where he and his wife built a home and studio near Bishop and lived until his death in 1979.
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SIMONPIETRI, Alfred H. (1916-2001). Painter. Born in Puerto Rico on June 20, 1916. While serving in the Army during World War Two, Simonpietri was in a plane crash. After the war he settled into a home in the Sunset District of San Francisco where he remained until his demise on December 2, 2001. A talented artist, he created hundreds of paintings, mostly nudes and still lifes. Biography provided courtesy of Edan Hughes Author Artists in California 1850-1940
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Arthur William BEST 1859 - 1935 Arthur William Best was born in Mount Pleasant, Canada on July 17, 1859. He and his brother Harry attended public school in Mount Pleasant and were members of a small band. Arthur played the cornet; Harry, the violin. When the band broke up in Oregon, the brothers learned to paint before moving to San Francisco in 1895. Arthur and his wife Alice established the Best Art School at 1625 California Street and a residence at 309 Broderick. He was a staff artist for the San Francisco Examiner (1904-06). Arthur was commissioned by Southern Pacific Railroad to paint pictures of the Southwest and Mexico for travel and tourist publicity in 1905. Many of his oils and watercolors were destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. His landscapes include depictions of the Arizona desert, Grand Canyon and the Sierra Nevada. He died in Oakland on January 26, 1935. Member: San Francisco Art Ass'n; Berkeley League of Fine Arts; Bohemian Club. Exhibited: Oregon State Fair, 1891 (first prize); Mark Hopkins Art Institute, 1898, 1904; San Francisco Art Ass'n, 1904-16; San Francisco Artists Society, 1905; Berkeley Art Ass'n, 1908; California State Fairs (awards); Alaska-Yukon Expo (Seattle), 1909 (bronze medal); Del Monte Art Gallery, 1910, 1912; Sorosis Club, 1913. Works held: Oakland Museum; Phoenix Museum; University of Oregon; Charles M. Russell Gallery (Great Falls, MT); Santa Fe Railroad.
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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.
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James March Phillips was born in Fresno California in 1913. His art career began in the 1940's while attending Jean Turner Art Academy in San Francisco where is studied under such prominent artists as Louis J. Rogers, Alfred Owles, and J. Paget Fredricks. His paintings were sold in numerous galleries in the west during the 1940's and 1950's. In recent years his paintings have become quite valuable and have reached prices as high as $13,000 at San Francisco auction house Bonhams Butterfields. This is one of a pair please view the other listing of the 7th hole Pebble Beach.
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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.
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Nels Hagerup (1864-1922) was born in Christiania, Norway in 1864 into a family that included the composer Edward Hagerup Grieg. Nels Hagerup studied at the Christiania Art School, Royal Academy in Berlin, and in Copenhagen with Carl Locher. After sailing to the West Coast as a merchant seaman in 1882, he settled in Portland, Oregon. There he was an instructor of drawing at the Bishop Scott Academy (now called Hill Academy) and was a founder of the Portland Art Association. About 1892 he moved to San Francisco where he remained. He worked there as a stevedore on the waterfront and later established a home and studio in the Sunset District at 1224 46th Avenue within walking distance of the ocean. Hagerup painted nearly 6,000 oils of sand dunes, ships and marine scenes. One of his more important works is the 16' x 18' mural in the Assembly Room of the San Francisco Merchants' Exchange Building. Hagerup was a master of atmospheric seascapes. He died of a heart attack in his studio on March 13, 1922. Exhibited: Lewis & Clark Expo (Portland), 1905 (gold medal); Alaska-Yukon Expo (Seattle), 1909 (gold medal); California Historical Society, 1963 (retrospective). Works held: California Historical Society; San Bruno (CA) Public Library.
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