biography
Born in New York City in 1836, Ransome Holdredge came to California via the Isthmus of Panama in 1858 and worked as a draftsman at the Mare Island Naval Yard. His paintings of the 1860s and early 1870s were signed "Holdridge" and were done in the realistic style of the Hudson River School. During this period he maintained a studio in San Francisco's Donahoe-Kelly Bank Bldg and exhibited locally. In 1874 he and Hiram Bloomer held a joint sale of their paintings to finance European studies. He left in that year and spent about two years studying in France. His obituary states that he was a field artist for Scribner's publications and was with Major Reno's troops at the time of the Custer massacre in 1876. After his studies in France, he returned to San Francisco with a distinctly different style. Paintings done after that time show the influence of the Barbizon School and were signed "Holdredge." His works were in great demand during his lifetime, received rave reviews by the local press, and were often considered superior to those done by William Keith. Holdredge traveled extensively throughout the Northwest, Southwest, the Rockies and western Canada, often living for long periods of time among the various Indian tribes. Due to his malnutrition and alcoholism, his paintings done during the latter part of his life were not of good quality. Like his friend Jules Tavernier, he made considerable money as an artist but did not manage his money well. He died penniless at the Alameda County (CA) Infirmary in April 1899 and was buried at public expense. ASSOCIATIONS San Francisco Art Association (cofounder) Bohemian Club EXHIBITIONS California State Fair, 1881-83 Mechanics' Institute (SF), 1868, 1880, 1886 COLLECTIONS Bohemian Club Oakland Museum Society of California Pioneers Orange County Museum California Historical Society Nevada Museum (Reno) Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley) Crocker Museum (Sacramento) Oregon Historical Society Source: Edan Hughes,
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.
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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"
Biography
Painter, etcher, and muralist, Will Sparks became one of California's premier artists, known for his mission and nocturnal adobe scenes. He was highly prolific, completing about three-thousand oil paintings. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and showed art talent as a youngster, selling his first painting when he was age twelve. He became a doctor, but his love of art prevailed. He attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and then went to New York and then Paris to the Academies Julian and Colarossi where he studied with Gerome, Harpignies, and Bouguereau. In Paris he earned money as an assistant to biologist Louis Pasteur for whom he made anatomical drawings. He was also much influenced by the Barbizon painters and Cezanne. He returned to St. Louis and in 1886 exhibited in the St. Louis Expo where he met Mark Twain whose stories of California inspired him to head West. He stayed briefly in Cincinnati and Denver and then California, where he did newspaper illustrations in Stockton and Fresno. In 1891, he settled in San Francisco, establishing a studio at 163 Sutter Street. He combined illustration work and writing for the San Francisco Evening Call with easel painting including all of the California missions. He was a member of the Bohemian Club, a free-spirited, fun loving group that lived "hand-to-mouth" for their art. He also painted in Arizona, and a painting Tucson was done in 1894. In 1904, he joined the faculty of the University of California, doing anatomy drawings for medical classes, and in 1907, he was a founder of the Del Monte Art Gallery. He died in San Francisco on March 30, 1937. His paintings are in the collections of the Huntington Library in San Marino and the Crocker Museum in Sacramento. Source: Edan Hughes,
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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.
Charles Baxter (March 1809 - 10 January 1879) was an English portrait and subject painter, known especially for his portraits of pretty young women. Baxter was born in Little Britain, London in 1809, the son of a book clasp maker, and started his career apprenticed to a bookbinder. However, he gave up this business to commence life as a professional painter, chiefly of miniatures and portraits. In 1834 he made the acquaintance of George Clint, from whom he received some valuable instruction, and in the same year exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy. In 1839 he joined the Clipstone Street Society, and studied there along with Paul Falconer Poole, William Müller, Edward Duncan (1804-1882), Joseph John Jenkins (1811-1885), Francis William Topham (1808-18), and others, who afterwards became distinguished in the profession. He became a member of the Society of British Artists in 1842, and contributed to its exhibitions many of the poetic and rustic subjects and fancy portraits upon which his reputation chiefly rests. His female heads are especially characterised by refinement of expression and purity of colour.
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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.
Biography
A native of New York and the son of an engraver, James David Smillie earned his early reputation for his etching skills but later for watercolor landscapes. He began etching at age 8, learning from his father, James Smillie (1807-1885). At age 14, he did a set of plates illustrating John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost. He had a job as a bank note engraver, and then he and his father had a business, collaborating as engravers with a specialty of bank-notes. They also did the engravings for the 1857 Mexican Boundary Survey Report. James David Smillie helped organize the New York Etching Club, and he was the U.S. representative to supply examples of American etchers' work to the Painters-Etchers Society of London. Although he continued working with etching, drypoint, aquatint and lithography, in 1865, he began doing landscape painting and was especially interested in mountain scenery. Smillie traveled in California in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains, and in the eastern United States in the Catskills and Adirondacks. From these trips he did illustrations that were published in 1872 in the magazine Picturesque America. In 1881, Smillie got married, and the couple had two sons. By 1884, he was in France, and spent much time there doing prints of landscapes, figures, portraits and cityscapes. Between 1888 and 1896, he produced a set of drypoint floral still-life prints. James David Smillie founded the American Watercolor Society and served as president and treasurer. He also taught classes at the National Academy of Design in 1868 and from 1894 to 1903.
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.)
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Chinese ceramics of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) constitute perhaps the foremost expression of ceramic art, not only in China but in the entire world. During the Song period, a unity of the essential components fundamental to the art: vessel shape, potting techniques, glaze, decoration, firing processes, and aesthetic theory were all combined in a high standard of excellence. In general, the shapes of Song Dynasty are simple and sedate by comparison to what preceded them and what was to follow. Likewise, the glazes tend to be monochromatic and subtle, a fluid, integral part of the form of the vessel they cover, with a depth of color and texture that invites the spectator to both touch and contemplate.
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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.
