Hearts were heavy across the fine art landscape this week after it was announced that John H. Moran (1942-2017) — founder of John Moran Auctioneers — passed away on October 3. We take a moment here to honor his legacy.

Via Jeff Moran, son of John H. Moran:

Dear Friends,

It is with a heavy and saddened heart I bear the news that on October 3rd, our founder, president, and friend peacefully departed on his next voyage — which, in true fashion, was during of one of the most successful auctions in our company’s history.

The Moran Family has received such an outpouring of support from friends and clients alike, I feel compelled here to express our deepest gratitude and with that, it is important to me to reciprocate with some important insights about my father.

The beauty of the auction business is that we get to handle, research, photograph, conserve and sell an unbelievable amount of interesting property each year which requires concentrated focus all the time. You need to have a burning passion for this business, and I can assure you that we do, as he did. Working alongside him over the years, my father reminded me that we are only the temporary custodians of our most prized possessions. This idea helps put things into perspective when dealing with the acquisitive nature of the art and antiques business.

Yet for my dad, it seems the scales were tipped inversely. We ran an auction business, but the people were often more interesting than their stuff! I remember my father would come home from work and say over dinner, “I met the most interesting gentleman today,” and he would proceed to share a tale about this person’s life story. Some stories were more riveting than others but most earned dinner table merit. One fellow in particular I remember hearing about, then meeting, was Walter. This man had inherited a sizable trust but preferred the simpler life of a 21st-century hobo. We eventually sold the contents of his parent’s estate, but he could not wait to be done with the excruciating process of dismantling his childhood. My dad and I sat and listened to Walter for hours, as this tall and quiet man, who resembled a figure in a Thomas Hart Benton painting, went on to describe his adventures (and misadventures) whilst jumping on and off trains for the last 20 years across the U.S. We all laughed together and got to be friends through the business.

Walter was just one character in a cast of thousands that created the larger storybook of our company. The people truly are as interesting as their stuff, sometimes more so. I believe this is the primary reason my father gravitated towards the auction business because for him, his passion was the people first, the stuff second. This was the guiding principle that would set Moran’s apart from the competition, and that is how he built our business.

His passing comes as not as a surprise to those close to him — as does the void that his death has left in the community — like a large oak tree that has fallen in the neighborhood and people stare at in disbelief that it is no more.

As I process my father’s death, it helps me to focus on the vitality of his life and the times we shared together. Specifically, the legacy he left behind with the auction company and the friends he made along the way in 50 years of doing what he loved and all the success that comes from that. If you are reading this e-mail, it means that you have participated with our company in some way, large or small, and are part of our story. Thank you.

— Jeff Moran

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On view through 2017 at the Newport Art Museum is a great retrospective of Christopher W. Benson from 1975 to 2017, illustrating the evolution of the artist’s style over the course of his forty-year career as a painter.

Raised in Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, Christopher W. Benson emerged from a family of artists and forged his own artistic path through teachers, art historical figures, friends, and his own intuition. Along the way, he found himself in Brooklyn, Cornwall, Newport, Berkeley, Tiverton, and Santa Fe, all of which stimulated the exploration of new content, styles, and ideas.

Benson’s forty-year career is now in focus through December 31 at the Newport Art Museum for a retrospective titled “Pictures & Windows: The Paintings of Christopher W. Benson from 1975-2017.” “As a representational painter, Benson absorbed various influences but nevertheless created something altogether new” the museum reported. “Familiar and yet innovative, Benson’s paintings are quintessentially American, hovering in a territory somewhere between the salt-of-the-earth realism of earlier New England coastal painters like Winslow Homer and George Bellows and the vibrancy of Bay Area Figuration. His work has also been influenced by other prominent American painters, such as Martin Johnson Heade, Edward Hopper, the regionalists of the 1930s, and the American Modernists Patrick Henry Bruce and Stuart Davis. From his early paintings of New York City to San Francisco Bay Area domestic interiors and streetscapes, to New Mexican landscapes, bi-coastal seascapes, and even some Mayan-influenced paintings, Benson takes us through an artistic odyssey that charts many of the potentials of his medium, from hard-edged realism to expressionism and abstraction.

To learn more, visit the Newport Art Museum.

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The Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming, is currently showcasing thirty-four mesmerizing paintings by this internationally known American painter.

For more than 50 years, artist Gary Erbe has been skillfully deceiving the eye with his photo-realistic paintings. On view now through October 29, The Brinton Museum is celebrating this storied career with “Gary Erbe: 50 Year Retrospective,” which highlights thirty-four of the artist’s best pictures.

According to the museum, “Erbe’s iconic images of Americana comprise a wide range of familiar subjects, including the golden age of television, sports, popular cartoons, classic Saturday morning matinees and culturally important social commentary.” The artist himself described, “I’ve always found ways of circumventing the so-called rules of trompe l-oeil in favor of originality, inventiveness and creativity.” Often, Erbe refers to his paintings as ‘levitational realism’, using flat space forms, shadow, light and color to create a visual story.

To learn more, visit the Brinton Museum.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Legendary fantasy artist Boris Vallejo explains during his current solo exhibition at Last Rites Gallery in New York.

Only days remain before a fantastic solo exhibition dismounts in New York. “Spiritus Vitae” continues through October 21 at Last Rites Gallery and features the works of renowned artist Boris Vallejo. During the show, Vallejo “presents his own unique, personal creative vision to the public: one that features colorful, vibrant scenes of feminine mythology,” the gallery says. “The dynamic compositions created expressly for this exhibition show a wide emotional and narrative range and a soft, feminine use of color and form.

“In ‘Flower Touch,’ he depicts a dramatically lit female figure seated, encased in a flower, embracing herself in a manner that simultaneously suggests intimacy and defensiveness. One of her lower legs extends outward, toes pointed. The other is encased in the bed of the flower itself. Both female and flower are feminine motifs and they are unified here, fusing into one whole, as the muscular forms of her figure blend into the botanical forms of the flower.

“Playful fantasy themes are another aspect of Vallejo’s work for this exhibition and the piece ‘Soap Bubble’ depicts exactly that. We see a muscular, butterfly-winged fairy seated on a flower, blowing aqua colored soap bubbles toward the sky. The mood is light and fun, and evocative of the Golden Age of Illustration dating back to Maxfield Parrish.”

To learn more, visit Last Rites Gallery.

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Where is the line between art and nature? Depending on who you ask, that line could be well-defined or blurred. The latter would be the case for artist John Evans, whose works are currently on display during a solo exhibition here.

Eight large-scale, playfully composed paintings of leafy botanic gardens and bays of water by artist John Evans are the subjects of a solo exhibition currently on view at Gallery Henoch in New York City. According to the gallery, “Evans does not describe a specific location; rather he elicits the feel of a simplified, yet universal place. He seeks to supplement our perspective of the real with a painterly vision.”

Evans added, “I visualize the world as a series of collages made of natural forms and concrete structures. In these paintings, I take apart each image and re-image the parts.” Evans is continually puzzling together taut design with energetic brushwork. He is careful to maintain a sense of immediacy in the execution. “It brings pleasure to observe works that merge a visual dance with a meditation. It is an aspiration for each painting I do.”

The exhibition, titled “Time & Place” continues through October 28. To learn more, visit Gallery Henoch.

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The celebration of Andrew Wyeth’s birth centennial continues across the nation, including at this well-known gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. Which works can you see there?

Whether it’s the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, or the United States Postal Service, 2017 has been a year full of commemorative celebrations surrounding the life and career of American icon and painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). The trend is continuing, this time at American Fine Art Inc. in Scottsdale, Arizona, with “100 Years of Andrew Wyeth,” which opens on November 9.

According to the gallery, “[the exhibition] showcases Wyeth’s sense of the human spirit and his unique perspective on the people and locations that surrounded him. The exhibition spans Wyeth’s career — from the early works reminiscent of Homer and his father N.C. Wyeth that established his reputation to two of the last pieces he would create, ‘Snow Hill’ and ‘The Crossing.’

“Wyeth hails from a family of artists, whose legends, teaching and talent extend a generation before and beyond. Andrew’s father, a renowned painter and illustrator N.C., advised him to ‘Paint the light and air around the subject — paint the mystery.’

“Andrew did just that. The magic and mystery can be seen in every portrait and landscape the artist paints. Although the realism in Wyeth’s paintings is so astonishingly accurate in detail that the textures and expressions of the models bring his scenes and characters to life, Wyeth himself said his style was more attuned to abstract expressionism than realism. Wyeth finds freedom in the dark spaces of his works, the mystery around the subject. In his unsentimental portraits, Wyeth allows his models’ true characters to come through. He considers his portrait of Karl Kuerner, one of his models and neighbors, the ‘best portrait I ever did,’ a thought-provoking image of the stoic WWII German machine gunner. This limited-edition work is also available at the gallery.”

To learn more, visit American Fine Art.

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Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was among the most characteristic and important French painters of his era. The National Gallery, Washington, has amassed — for the first time — the artist’s remarkable series known as the “fantasy figures” for this significant exhibition.

There are some 14 paintings in total that compose a special body of work called the “fantasy figures” by 18th-century French painter Jean Honoré Fragonard. The works are brightly colored paintings of lavishly costumed individuals and are among the artist’s most beloved works. The subjects are depicted in various poses during leisure activities, such as acting, reading, writing, playing instruments, or singing.

For the first time, these paintings have been brought together for a special exhibition by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. “Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures” opened on October 8 and “explores the many interpretations of this series in the context of the artist’s career and elucidates the development of that career, the identity of his sitters and patrons, and the significance of his innovative imagery,” the museum writes. “Fragonard strove to create a specific portrait type that showcased the painterly skill for which he was renowned. Created within the competitive atmosphere of the Parisian art world, these works were influenced by a range of events, artworks, and visitors to his studio. Shaped by artistic imagination, these paintings pushed the boundaries of accepted figure painting in the 18th century.”

In addition to the 14 “fantasy figures,” the exhibition will be showing a newly discovered drawing with 18 thumbnail-sized sketches, apparently annotated in the rococo artist’s own hand. Continuing, the museum suggests, “The drawing, ‘Sketches of Portraits,’ emerged at a Paris auction in 2012 and upended several long-held assumptions about the fantasy figures: 14 of the sketches have been identified with these paintings, and four presumably relate to works that remain unknown. All but one of the sketches are annotated with a name, presumably that of the person portrayed or the individual who commissioned the corresponding painting — thereby putting to rest a long-standing debate over whether the fantasy figures depict known individuals or imaginary models. At the National Gallery of Art, the emergence of this drawing prompted a two-year investigation of ‘Young Girl Reading,’ conducted as a collaborative effort by Yuriko Jackall, assistant curator of French paintings, John K. Delaney, senior imaging scientist, and Michael Swicklik, senior conservator of paintings. Their findings establish ‘Young Girl Reading’ as a part of the fantasy figure series and shed light upon Fragonard’s approach to the ensemble as a whole.”

The exhibition will continue through December 3. To learn more, visit The National Gallery of Art.

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Perhaps you’ve heard, perhaps not, but Christie’s Bellwether Postwar and Contemporary Evening sale in New York this November will be led by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. What’s the scoop?

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” circa 1500, is believed to be the last painting by the Renaissance genius still in private hands. That could all change on Wednesday, November 15 as Christie’s New York will be auctioning the work during its Postwar and Contemporary Evening Sale. Experts also conclude that the work is one of fewer than 20 extant paintings accepted as from the artist’s own hand, making the sale of the painting one of the most memorable in recent years.

“[“Salvator Mundi”] is the Holy Grail of Old Master paintings,” said Alan Wintermute, senior specialist in Old Masters at Christie’s. “To see a fully finished late masterpiece by Leonardo — made at the peak of his genius — appear for sale in 2017 is as close as I’ve ever come to an art-world miracle.” The painting displays Christ as Savior of the World. Shown frontally and in three-quarter view, Christ gazes peacefully out upon the viewer as his right hand is shown in a traditional blessing gesture. He wears a jewel-encrusted and embroidered blue cloak, and his left hand holds a glass sphere, signaling his dominion over the world — and the cosmos.

Currently, Christie’s is touring the exceptional painting before its sale on the 15th; the painting is on view in San Francisco through tomorrow, October 20. It will then move to London with viewing between October 24-26 before landing in New York for an extended exhibition from October 28-November 4.

A painting this exceptional is difficult, at best, to value as there will surely be aggressive bidding by many parties. However, experts have suggested the painting could reach $100 million. To learn more, visit Christie’s.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.