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.
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.
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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.
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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Biography
Anna Althea Hills was born January 28, 1882 in Ravenna, Ohio. She studied at the Chicago Art Institute; Cooper Union Art School in New York City; she worked with Arthur Dow (1857-1922) and later studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. While in Europe she studied with John Noble Barlow (1861-1917). In 1912 she moved to Laguna Beach, California becoming a leading member of the Laguna Beach art community. She was an active member of the California Art Club, held a membership at the Washington Watercolor Club and served at the Laguna Beach Art Association as president from 1922 to 1925 and from 1927 to 1930. Hills was highly regarded as an art teacher and encouraged the study of the visual arts at the local public schools. Captivated and inspired by her new surroundings, she created atmospheric impressionist landscapes showing a reverence and appreciation of nature. The subjects of her plein-air landscapes varied from treescapes, the Laguna Beach coastline, Mission San Juan Capistrano, the vast Southern California and Arizona deserts, Santa Ana Canyon, arroyos and interior scenes. Hills won the Bronze Medal at the Panama-California Exposition, San Diego in 1915; the Bronze Medal at the California State Fair, 1919; and the Landscape Prize at the Laguna Beach Art Association, 1922, 1923. She died at the early age of forty-eight on June 13, 1930 in Laguna Beach, California.
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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.
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Camille Pissarro (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54. Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. As a stylistic forerunner of Impressionism, he is today considered a "father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, including Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.[2]
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