John Frederick Lewis (British, 1805-1876), “Portrait of a lady in a straw hat,” pencil and watercolor, oval, 29 x 24cm, signed and dated 'JF Lewis 1837' (lower right); Provenance
Sale, Christies New York, April 5th, 2005, lot 151; Lowell Libson, London; Property of a Nobleman
Bellmans has announced that the March auction of Old Masters, British, and European paintings on Thursday, March 28, 2024 will include three artists’ collections with works of four artists born in the 19th Century, all coming from descendants and new to the market. Two of which are well-known for their outstanding work depicting animals, in particular dogs and wild cats, Herbert Dicksee and Arthur Wardle, and Frank Dicksee, who was best known for his portraits and landscapes, while Arthur Croft also excelled in the latter.
Ludwig Hans Fischer (Austrian, 1848-1915), “The Courtyard,” oil on canvas, 86 x 107cm, signed and dated ‘Ludwig Hans Fischer 1879’ (lower left)
The Arthur Croft Collection
A highlight of the collection from the family of the artist Arthur Croft (1828-1902) is an oil painting by Frederick Arthur Bridgman (American, 1847-1928), “Sanctuary in the Sahara,” signed and dated 1879. It was first exhibited in London at the 1880 annual exhibition of the Royal Academy and is the product of Bridgman’s second visit to Algeria.
While he focused on Algiers during his first trip in 1872-73, during his second trip to North Africa, he decided to investigate the smaller towns and villages south of the metropolis, which remained less westernized, despite French control of the region.
Frederick Arthur Bridgman (American, 1847-1928), “Sanctuary in the Sahara,” oil on canvas, 56 x 87cm, signed and dated ‘F. A Bridgman 1879’ (lower left); Provenance, The artist Arthur Croft (1828-1902), Thence by family descent; Exhibited London, Royal Academy, Annual, 1880, no. 1880Edwin Alexander (Scottish, 1870-1926), “A peacock,” watercolor, 23.5 x 18.5cm, signed with initials ‘E.A.’ (lower right); Provenance, Private collection, UK
Works by Herbert and Frank Dicksee from the collection of the late Pamela Service
Bellmans Fine Art Auctioneers are also delighted to be offering a fine and eclectic group of works by Herbert (1862-1942) and Frank Dicksee (1853-1928), from the collection of the late Pamela Service, Herbert’s granddaughter. Both Herbert and Frank’s fathers were artists; John Dicksee (1817-1905), a portrait painter, and Thomas Dicksee (1819-1895), a genre, historical, and portrait painter, respectively.
Arthur Wardle – The Studio Sale
The studio sale of another contemporary of the former, Arthur Wardle (1860-1949), offers a superb collection of oil paintings, pastels, watercolors, sketches, and sculptures by one of the foremost British animal artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The lasting appeal of Wardle’s work is arguably down to its lack of sentimentality and anthropomorphism; the technical brilliance with which he renders anatomy is matched only by the palpable sense of character and vitality.
Todd Connor (b. 1964), "The Widow and the Widower," 2022, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in., winner of the 2023 Night of Artists Museum Purchase Award
The Briscoe Western Art Museum will soon host its much-anticipated Night of Artists, a selling exhibition featuring more than 280 new paintings, sculptures, and mixed media works by over 85 Western artists. Their pieces encompass landscapes, wildlife, portraiture, and scenes of Native Americans and cowboys.
Kim Wiggins, “Fruit Stand at Verlarde,” oil, 12 x 16 in.
During the festive opening weekend (March 22–23, 2024), the museum will offer events including a collectors’ summit, preview dinner, awards breakfast, live auction, exhibition opening, and “luck of the draw” sale. Then, from March 24 through May 5, unsold works will be available to view and purchase at fixed prices. Tickets for the opening events are available via the museum’s website.
Kenny McKenna, “Palo Duro Wash,” oil, 42 x 30 in.
Located along the San Antonio River Walk, the Briscoe Western Art Museum’s main building was constructed in the 1930s as a public library. After an extensive renovation, the museum opened in 2013, and a branch of the public library still operates on the first floor.
Abigail Gutting,” Of Ballads and Fables,” oil on linen, 30 x 48 in.
The institution is named in honor of the late Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, Jr., and his wife, Janey Slaughter Briscoe, who envisioned a museum that would share the story of Western heritage and the remarkable people behind it. This year is especially momentous because the museum has recently produced the first publication surveying its rich and growing permanent collection.
Sharon Weaver, "Golden Bay," oil with gold leaf, 18 x 24 in.
“From Field to Frame: The PAC6 Show How It’s Done”
Santa Paula Art Museum, California
On view through July 7, 2024 santapaulaartmuseum.org
The PAC6 Painters return to the Santa Paula Art Museum with an all-new exhibition, “From Field to Frame: The PAC6 Show How It’s Done.” PAC6 is a group of six women artists from Southern California who travel and paint together across the country. The artists are Linda Brown, Marian Fortunati, Nita Harper, Debra Holladay, Laura Wambsgans, and Sharon Weaver.
The PAC6 painters in Palm Springs
For PAC6, “From Field to Frame” marks ten years of collaboration, and is their third major exhibition for the Santa Paula Art Museum. The show features over 70 new landscape paintings, including scenes from the group’s most recent “bucket list” trips to the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley in Arizona, and Hope Valley and the Monterey Peninsula in California. In other paintings, the artists have revisited some of their favorite destinations from the past decade, including Yosemite, Ediza Lake, and Lake Tahoe.
Laura Wambsgans, “Sun Kissed Morning”Linda Brown, “Canyon Air”
The exhibit also offers a peek behind the curtain of the creative processes used by the PAC6, showing each artist’s journey from a small plein air (outdoors) painting or sketch executed on location, to a final, framed masterpiece created in the studio.
As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
Golden Glow, Denise Antaya, oil on linen, 16 x 12 in; Denise Antaya
Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
Cornelia Hernes (b. 1979), "Midsummer Night [after Arthur Rackham’s Fair Helena]," 2013, oil on canvas, 35 1/3 x 23 2/3 in.
Art Collection Profile > Robert C. Kennedy of Norfolk, Virginia, has assembled a significant collection of representational paintings, most of them figurative. He recalls, “From an early age, I was attracted to beauty in the visual and decorative arts. My older sister, Bev, was an amateur artist and showed me how to paint a few leaves on one of her still life scenes, but I never developed the skill further. Being from a small town in the rural Midwest, I did not even visit an art museum until I was in college.” (That was the great Art Institute of Chicago, which he still admires.)
Robert C. Kennedy
Robert says that during college he started buying art posters, then visiting local art shows. Those experiences refined his eye, which surely also benefitted from the professional career he ultimately pursued — choosing the visual content and writing historical commentary for free educational websites that featured cartoons by Thomas Nast and other late 19th-century illustrators.
It was in the late 1990s that the Internet awakened Robert to the classical realism movement taking shape then. His first major purchase in this field was “Fall,” a still life painted in 2002 by Juliette Aristides, who has authored several bestselling books including Classical Painting Atelier (2008). That transformative acquisition was made at the influential San Francisco gallery founded and run by John Pence for 44 years, a place Robert rightly remembers as “extraordinary.”
Since then, he has purchased mainly from galleries and only occasionally from artists. He laughs, “Perhaps the most dramatic example of the latter was the Norwegian artist Cornelia Hernes’s breathtakingly gorgeous ‘Midsummer Night,’ which she shipped to me directly from Sweden, where she was living at the time.”
Cornelia Hernes (b. 1979), “Midsummer Night [after Arthur Rackham’s Fair Helena],” 2013, oil on canvas, 35 1/3 x 23 2/3 in.Today the contemporary artists represented in Kennedy’s collection are Kari Lise Alexander, Erin Anderson, Angela Andrieux, Juliette Aristides, Stephen Bauman, Jura Bedic, Mia Bergeron, Laurie Lee Brom, Scott Burdick, Ali Cavanaugh, Helen Cooper, Philippe Couture, Tiffany Dae, Hunter Eddy, Eric Gibbons, Jessica Gordon, Cornelia Hernes, Solomon Isekeije, Michelle Jader, Karin Jurick, Steven J. Levin, Lacey Lewis, Susan Lyon, Anne May, Jennifer McChristian, John McClarey, Winona Nelson, Teresa Oaxaca, Tae Park, Pam Poncé, Carolyn Pyfrom, Megan Robison, John Sagartz, Travis Schlaht, Richard Thomas Scott, Sara Scribner, Kerry Brooks Simmons, June Stratton, Terry Strickland, Peter Van Dyke, Susan Werby, Katie Wilson, Anna Wypych, Ryan Wurmser, R. Scott Young, Yuzhu Zheng, and Ni Zhu.
Through two decades of experience, Robert has arrived at some helpful guidelines for collecting from which all of us can learn. He advises, “When buying what you love, make sure it will be an enduring love, not a fleeting infatuation. That’s why it’s a good idea to make decisions with your head as well as your heart.”
The keys to building an art collection are, in his own words:
The artwork should be skillfully created (design, composition, technique, etc.).
It should compel and sustain your attention upon purchase and then over the years, eliciting a sense of transcendence beyond the mundane, even if its subject is ordinary.
It should, in some aspect, be distinctive. For example, even it’s a straightforward portrait, something about it should distinguish it from similar portraits.
It should integrate into your collection, or a subset of it, without duplicating anything —or have the potential to launch a new subset. Your overall goal should be creating a collection that has harmony without uniformity, variety without dissonance.
Robert’s directive that an artwork “compel” attention is epitomized by his somewhat circuitous acquisition of Terry Strickland’s painting “Voice of the Tiger.”
Terry Strickland (b. 1960), “Voice of the Tiger,” 2010, oil on canvas over panel, 33 x 32 in.
“About a dozen years ago, I saw it on the Robert Lange Studios website and was captivated. Disappointingly, it was marked ‘sold,’ yet I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Checking back a week later, I was pleasantly surprised to learn it was now available because the other clients had backed out (to their later regret). Ever since, ‘Voice of the Tiger’ has been a central piece in my collection. Its acquisition also solidified my realization that I was developing a substantial collection and prodded more serious thinking about that fact.”
Robert’s passion is further reflected by the fact that, in recent years, he has been e-mailing artists “once their work reaches my home to express my gratitude for their talent.” Not surprisingly, they are usually charmed and respond kindly. Just for example, the Chinese-born, U.S.-based artist Ni Zhu replied with video clips of Ngawang, the Tibetan monk represented in her painting. “Closer to home,” Robert adds, “I volunteer to oversee monthly art shows at a library and have developed friendships with several of the exhibiting artists.”
Looking forward, Robert is deeply encouraged by “the proliferation of high-quality ateliers and workshops, including some for young people. My teenaged niece, Erin, is a talented artist, so this is a particularly hopeful development for the field and for my family.”
Fine Art Today covers artists and products we think you’ll love. Linked products are independently selected and linked to for your convenience. If you buy something using a link on this page, Streamline Publishing may receive a small share of that sale.
Graham Little, "Untitled (Sleeping)," 2014, gouache on paper, 29 × 47 cm, Photo from Alison Jacques
The FLAG Art Foundation (New York, New York) presents an exhibition of works on paper by Graham Little, marking the British artist’s debut institutional solo presentation in the United States. Created between 2000 and 2023, these sixteen gouache and colored pencil works are meticulous portals into Little’s complex and mysterious universe.
Graham Little begins each composition by scouring artist monographs and stacks of weathered spreads in fashion magazines from the 1970s and 1980s. With a reverence for reference, his scenes infuse late-twentieth-century advertising aesthetics with lush art-historical motifs, such as in “Untitled (Bedroom),” 2021, in which decorative flourishes—reminiscent of the late British designer Terence Conran—furnish a mantle beneath a couple depicted in the stiffened style of Etruscan funerary art. Little’s palette radiates warmth, and yet, his exacting handiwork and needlelike ornamentations are also coolly imperceptible, pristine, and smooth. In Little’s world, not a hair is out of place; each refined figure is a custodian of the quietly immaculate interiors and exteriors they inhabit.
Layering the aesthetics and ideals of Western advertising culture and art history, Little’s out-of-time characters are positioned with an air of remove. Born out of commercial photography, the men and women inhabiting these uncanny scenes are meant to be looked at and are conscious of it—participants in their own objectification.
The intimate scale of Little’s work further reinforces its conceptual foundations; as if peering through the window of a miniature model, viewers are encouraged to physically lean in and absorb the nuance of each detail. Despite their physicality, the ambiguous contexts of his subjects inspire endless curiosity: What is the man in the wine-colored robe and slippers reading while he sips his morning coffee? Who is the woman in an elaborate white and red-hearted apron—which matches her tablecloth and starched napkins—entertaining for tea? How did the mangy fox die? Little’s compositions are keepers of their secrets, flexible to viewers’ infinite imaginations.
A commissioned text by Hettie Judah, chief art critic at the British daily paper The i, accompanies Little’s exhibition. This exhibition is on view through May 4, 2024.
Details: www.flagartfoundation.org
As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
Norman Rockwell (1894–1978), "Sleigh Ride (Study for The Dover Coach)," 1935, oil on board, 9 x 22 in., estimate $50,000–$70,000 at March in Montana
All eyes are on Great Falls, Montana, the town of 60,000 that will come alive during its 55th Western Art Week. It was on March 19, 1864, that the Western master Charles M. Russell was born in St. Louis, and it was in Great Falls that he spent the second half of his life; he died there in 1926.
A highlight will be the 37th Annual March in Montana Auction & Dealer Show, presented by Coeur d’Alene Galleries and Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (March 14–16, marchinmontana.com) and emceed by master auctioneer Troy Black. Among its 750 lots will be Western and sporting art and cowboy and Indian collectibles, with particular strength in Native American weavings and beadwork, the art of William Gollings, and woodcarvings by Montana’s John L. Clarke. Another exciting aspect are modern Native American artworks by such masters as Jaune “Quick to See” Smith, William Standing, George Flett, and Allan Houser.
Illustrated here is Norman Rockwell’s preliminary oil sketch for a mural that now hangs at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan. Included with this lot is a trove of fascinating notes, books, photographs, and magazines that provide valuable documentary information about the painting.
Lots of other activities will be making Great Falls hop this March. Also occurring March 14–16 is The Russell, organized by the C.M. Russell Museum (cmrussell.org). It encompasses several parties, an educational symposium, the First Strike auction featuring contemporary artworks, and the main live auction that involves both historical and modern works.
Running concurrently nearby will be the Out West Art Show & Sale, Legends West Art Show, Great Western Show, Western Heritage Artists — Footprints on the Trail, Studio 706 Spring Show, and Wild Bunch Art Show. As if that were not enough, the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art will be open as usual, presenting its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.
On View > Finding Hidden Treasures: The Art of Samuel Adoquei
The Long Island Museum, New York longislandmuseum.org
Through June 2, 2024
Samuel Adoquei, “Social Studies,” 1994 and 2008, Oil on Canvas, 46 ¼ x 58 ½ in.
From the museum:
This exhibition is the first museum retrospective of Samuel Adoquei, a Ghanaian-born, New York-based painter and winner of the Gold Medal in Oil Painting and Best Traditional Oil Painting awards at the Knickerbockers Artists Annual International Exhibition. Adoquei taught at the National Academy of Design and is still the first and only African artist to teach at all of New York’s major art institutions and academies (in addition to N.A.D., the Art Students League, New York Academy of Art, and the Educational Alliance).
Samuel Adoquei, “Rodney,” 1995, Oil on Masonite board, 24 x 30 in. (unframed)
Adoquei, whose major portraits and historical paintings are known for their ambition, provocation, and technical mastery, has been commissioned to complete portraits of prominent public figures, such as the politician Stacey Abrams. On Long Island, he has painted landscape scenes at Shelter Island, East Hampton, and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory campus.
Samuel Adoquei, “Afternoon, Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, New York,” 12 x 16 in.
“We are so grateful to Sam for sharing his incredibly skillful work with our audience. He is so versatile and gifted as an artist, and manages to powerfully evoke the spirit of wherever or whomever he is painting, be it site-specific landscapes or careful portraiture,” said Joshua Ruff, Co-Executive Director of the Long Island Museum.
Samuel Adoquei, “A Monk in Yellow (Meditation),” 54 x 30 in.
“Finding Hidden Treasures” is on view in the History Museum until June 2, 2024, and will feature almost 30 works by Adoquei, including his significant 10’-wide triptych “The Legacy and Burial of Martin Luther King,” a painting featured in the New York Times and once exhibited at the S. Dillon Ripley Center of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
David A. Leffel (b. 1931), "Antique Chinese Bird Feeders," 2022, oil on canvas, 13 1/2 x 16 1/2 in.
InSight Gallery is set to open a selling show of recent artworks by David A. Leffel and Sherrie McGraw, the Taos-based artists, authors, and teachers renowned for their virtuosity and generous sharing of knowledge with younger artists.
At a Glance:
Mystery and Light: David A. Leffel and Sherrie McGraw
InSight Gallery
Fredericksburg, Texas insightgallery.com
March 1–31, 2024
Born in Brooklyn, David A. Leffel (b. 1931) spent 11 years of his childhood battling a bone disease in various hospitals. He used that time to hone his drawing abilities, which eventually led him to enroll in Parsons School of Design, as well as Fordham University. At the Art Students League of New York (ASLNY), he flourished under teacher Frank Mason and ultimately taught there himself for 25 years.
In his reclaiming of forgotten techniques, Leffel has been especially inspired by 17th-century Dutch painting; like his idol, Rembrandt, he has mastered contrasts of light and shadow that evoke timeless beauty and a touch of mystery. He has perfected the depiction of what the late art historian Michael Zakian called “light falling and flowing over objects. By treating light as a vital force, Leffel gives his paintings the feeling that they are infused with life.”
Sherrie McGraw (b. 1954), “Venus,” 2023, pastel on card, 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 in.
Sherrie McGraw (b. 1954) grew up in a large, supportive family in Ponca City, 100 miles north of Oklahoma City, the state capital where she spent three years in the mid-1970s studying art with Richard and Edith Goetz. Eventually McGraw headed to the ASLNY, even moonlighting as a night guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the League, she acquired the rigorous drawing techniques handed down from its legendary instructors George B. Bridgman (1865–1943) and Robert Brackman (1898–1980), and she learned about painting from other teachers, including David A. Leffel. By 1984, at just 30, McGraw was teaching her own classes at ASLNY.
Through her bestselling book, The Language of Drawing: From an Artist’s Viewpoint (2005), McGraw has become a champion of the age-old, yet dismayingly overlooked, fact that sound draftsmanship is the bedrock of artistry. Drawing, she explains, is that crucial stage “where one learns to see,” where the intimate act of capturing the essence of a subject takes place. “A good draftsman,” she posits, “knows more and draws less.”
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