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"The summer of 1927 found me domiciled in the quaint and picturesque fishing village of Concarneau, where by chance, I made the acquaintance of a fellow painter, Arthur Hill Gilbert, an upstanding but modest and unassuming young chap. Always an indefatigable worker, he was even then realizing a brilliant series of studies, colorful rocks, boats and the ancient walls of Concarneau’s medieval stronghold.

 

Later that fall we met again in the Normandy countryside. Gilbert, as ever, painting fervidly the glorious and changing effects of autumn and the swift running stream of the Seine.

 

Due to later circumstances, we temporarily lost sight of each other, I went back to Paris and Gilbert returned to his homeland.

 

In the east, Gilbert exhibited in the important National Art Shows, his work bringing him instant success and recognition. The Hallgarten, Ranger and J. Francis Murphy memorial prizes given for the most distinguished landscapes of the year were his awards. Elected to the membership in that most august society of painters, the National Academy of Design, followed soon after.

 

Gilbert, originally a native of Illinois, was educated at Northwestern University. At completion of his courses there he entered the Academy at Annapolis and later served in the Navy as an Ensign during World War One. At the end of hostilities, he received his discharge from the Navy and then left for a long awaited sojourn in France where he decided to study painting as a future career.

 

California ultimately was destined to become his abode and permanent home. At Monterey late in ’39 (by a fortunate coincidence) we found ourselves together. As ever, Gilbert had been painting fruitfully and prodigiously. Here was his Promised Land and the subject matter he loved and understood. With taste and instinctive feeling, plus a complete mastery of his craft, he had each day discovered new and enchanting subject motif that stimulated his ever ready imagination – noble hills, majestic oaks, giant rocks, beating surf and cloud forms of surpassing beauty – all were subjects that flowed naturally from his subtle brush on to the willing and waiting canvas.

 

Gilbert’s paintings of California will remain a monument to his art and to the lovely land he cherishes. To know his work is to know the man himself – modest, generous and wholly understanding".

 

By Abel G. Warshawsky (1883-1962)

Fellow artist and close friend of Arthur Hill Gilbert

Born in Tennessee in 1879, George Demont Otis was pursuing studies at the Chicago Art Institute by age fourteen. Further studies in New York and Pennsylvania brought friendships with many significant artists of the day, including Robert Henri, John Sloan, and Winslow Homer. However, it wasn’t until Otis had pitched for three seasons as a professional baseball player before he committed to full-time career in the arts. From his Chicago studio (also later in Colorado and New Mexico) Otis would travel often, including painting trips with his close friend Thomas Moran, the famous Rocky Mountain School artist.

 

Having first traveled to California in 1900, Otis arrived again in 1919. Upon establishing a studio in Burbank, his artistic career blossomed, becoming part of Hollywood’s ‘roaring twenties’ scene. Otis was an active exhibiting member of many leading art associations in California and nationally. By 1930 he had moved again and soon established his permanent studio-home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. In addition to a distinguished art career, Otis was also an ardent conservationist, playing an active role in the formation of the Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate Recreational Area.

 

One of the leading landscape painters of California, Granville Redmond’s visual sensitivities were undoubtedly heightened by his very early loss of hearing, and hence, a lack of verbal expression. Insightful observations and the ability to draw, read, write and sign were important tools for a young Redmond. Fortunately, with a formative educational foundation, his talents blossomed into an artistic career in which Redmond uniquely expressed his visions of California.

 

Whether canvases of sunlit wildflowers or tonal twilight, Redmond’s legacy is both spiritual and inspiring.

Born in 1873, Jack Wilkinson Smith received his artistic training at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the Cincinnati Art Academy. Leaving an early career in commercial art and scene work, Smith moved west to Los Angeles in 1906 to pursue his ambition to become a successful easel painter.

 

He soon became an integral part of the art community in southern California, receiving critical acclaim as a painter of coastal marine scenes and sierra landscapes. Smith helped to found the Sketch Club as well as the Biltmore Salon in Los Angeles and was an inaugural member of the California Art Club and the Laguna Beach Art Association.

 

Smith was also a member of a select group of artists known as the "Ten Painters Club of California". Holding exhibitions at the Kanst Art Galleries in Los Angeles and promoted as the ten foremost artists of the west, the other members included: Maurice Braun, Benjamin Brown, R. Clarkson Colman, Edgar Payne, Hanson Puthuff, Guy Rose, Elmer and Marion Wachtel, and William Wendt.

 

Born in Hildesheim, Hannover (now part of Germany), Edmund Henry Osthaus was born on August 5, 1858. He studied at the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf with Andreas Muller, Peter Jansen, E. von Gebhardt, Ernst Deger, and Christian Kroner. It wasn’t until 1883 that Osthaus joined his family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, that he furthered his artistic career and developed a subject matter that he would become famous for. While working at the Toledo Academy of Fine Arts in Ohio, Osthaus began focusing his subject matter on hunting scenes, primarily of the sporting dogs. From 1886 until 1893 Osthaus was the principal at the Academy, continually improving on his technique and enjoying his other passions, hunting and fishing. Because of his great interest in both hunting and sporting dogs, Osthaus became one of the founding members of the National Field Trial Association in the 1890’s. Osthaus was well recognized around the country, building a studio in Los Angeles in 1911, as well as homes in Ohio and New Jersey and a hunting lodge in Marianna, Florida. He created a series of postcards, prints, and calendar pictures for DuPont. His work was also commissioned by such magnates as the Vanderbilts and Morgans who admired his large-scale scenes of life-like animals at work and at play. Osthaus passed away on January 30, 1928 at his hunting lodge in Marianna, Florida. His works have been shown in the Toledo Museum of Art, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Butler Institute of American Art.

 

Alfred Fontville de Breanski was born into a family of painters. Not only was his father the highly regarded Victorian landscape painter, Alfred de Bréanski, Sr., but his mother was theWelsh painter, Annie Roberts. In addition, his uncle Gustave de Bréanski was a noted seascape painter, and his aunt Julie had also trained as an artist. Working as a painter, then, was something of a family business. Born in London in 1877, the young de Breanski was the oldest son in a family of seven children. Naturally, he began to study art early in life, training with his father and uncle along with his younger brother, Arthur. He then enrolled at St. Martins School of Art, the prestigious London institution now known as Central St. Martins College of Art and Design.
 
Because of his father’s work as a landscape painter, the family often traveled to Wales where the scenery was especially appealing—and of course, Annie Roberts de Bréanski’s family was there. This provided an opportunity for the children to test their abilities as landscape artists and to master the skills they would later need to establish their own careers. A. F. de Breanski’s early works are, unsurprisingly, in the style of his father—luminous naturalistic landscapes of Welsh mountains or Scottish Highlands.
 
Because of the similarity of their names, a note must be added about the signatures used by the elder and younger Alfred de Breanski. In general, the elder painter used his full name, including an accent aigu over the “é” in his last name, while his son did not. Alfred Jr. often signed his work as A. F. de Breanski, sometimes including “Jr.” after his last name; occasionally he also used A. Fontville rather than Breanski. The system wasn’t foolproof, but it did aid in clarifying which member of this talented family was the source of a particular painting.
 
By the 1890s, de Breanski ventured to France to “finish” his artistic education. There he met the elderly James McNeil Whistler and also explored the incredibly diverse arts community of belle époque Paris. The influence of this sojourn is evident in his increasingly Symbolist treatment of his characteristic landscapes, as in Evening at Loch Vennaeker where naturalism has evolved into a more abstract composition intended as a private meditative image. Simultaneously, he absorbed the Impressionist’s emphasis on unadulterated color and stenographic brushwork. Fishing Fleet in the Harbour, for example, owes a debt to the work of Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet in its concentration on the effects of light on water, and the clearly visible brushstrokes defining the scene.
 
On his return to London, de Breanski began to display his paintings at the annual metropolitan exhibitions, both at the Royal Academy and at the Royal Society of British Artists, a more unbiased exhibition venue than the conventional Academy. Beginning in 1905, he enjoyed considerable success with a series of garden paintings, this time using an Impressionistic approach to technique to depict the traditional picturesque elements of English garden design. Included in this popular group of paintings at the Royal Academy exhibitions were: A Cottage Garden, 1907; Summer, 1912; Willows, 1914; and Autumn Gold, 1917.   Although not documented as an intentional series on the theme of English gardens, it seems likely that de Breanski was influenced by the well-known series paintings produced by Monet beginning in the 1880s. In addition, Monet himself lived in London for brief periods in 1901 and 1904-05 while working on a series of paintings featuring the Thames River and the Houses of Parliament, a fact that was duly recorded in the local newspapers. 
 
In large part because of the warm critical and popular reception of de Breanski’s garden paintings, he was approached by the Underground Electric Railways Company to design at least two posters for the new London transit system.  Both of these 30 x 20 inch images were intended to remind Londoners that the beauty of parks, gardens and forests were readily accessible to everyone simply by hopping on the trams. Twickenham by Tram illustrates two swans in the foreground of a bucolic pond while modest slips for rowboats dot the shoreline in the distance; broad flat areas of golden ink and delicate cream-colored reflections suggest a bright sunny day in suburban Twickenham—surely a destination that all right-minded Londoners would want to explore. Likewise, Kew Gardens by Tram showcases the renowned botanical gardens there, spotlighting the water lilies in full bloom in the foreground. 
 
Printed in 1915 by Johnson, Riddle & Company, Ltd., these decidedly art nouveau designs were posted on the front of buses and on the side panels of the new trams, thus reinforcing the concept that high quality art was not restricted to salons, academies and museums, but available to all people every day. With these posters, de Breanski positioned himself firmly in the modern movement of the early twentieth century, dedicated to unifying so-called “high art” with “commercial art,” very much in the spirit of the Parisian poster artists, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret.
 
During the 1920s de Breanski continued to paint landscapes and garden images although by then his work began to seem somewhat old-fashioned. In more recent times, there has been a reassessment of his work as scholars begin to explore historical developments beyond the modernist canon. 
 
                                                        Janet Whitmore, Ph.D.
 
 
Selected Museums
 
Government Art Collection, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, London
London Transport Museum
Watford Museum, Watford, UK
 
The name Isidore-Jules Bonheur is synonymous with the great animalier school of sculptors of the late 19th century, alongside Antoine-Louis Bayre and Pierre-Jules Mene. His elder sister, Rosa (1822-1899), was equally well-known, both for her bronzes as well as her paintings, notably The Horse Fair in the Metropolitan Museum, NY. Of Great significance to their sculpture careers, their younger sister, Juliette (1830-1891), married the bronze founder Hippolyte Peyrol. Peyrol was a master caster and his foundry in Paris is rightly considered one of the finest of the period. He cast the best works by both Isidore and Rosa and these always beat the tiny PEYROL stamp, as can be found on the present work. Hippolyte and Juliette’s son, François-Auguste-Hippolyte Peyrol, became a painter and studied under both his uncle and his aunt. When Rosa died in 1899, it was he, along with Isidore, who collaborated on the Monument au Rosa Bonheur in Fountainebleu.

Frederick Arthur Bridgman has been regarded as one of the most influential and praised American Orientalist painters.   Frederick Arthur Bridgman was born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1847. Shortly after, his family moved to Boston and later New York. His artistic talent first emerged in his teenage years when he worked for the American Banknote Company as an apprentice engraver. He enrolled in the National Academy of Design in 1863. Bridgman traveled to Pont-Aven and Paris in 1866 and joined the atelier of Jean-Léon Gerome, where he continued to study for four years. Gerome sparked his interest in Orientalism and Bridgman ultimately became one of the leading members of the Pont-Aven artist’s colony in Brittany.

 
In 1872 Bridgman began to travel to Spain and North Africa, focusing on Orientalist and archaeological subjects in places such as Tangiers and Algeria. While he moved on from Tangiers due to the poverty of the city, he found excitement and exoticism in Algiers, discovering scenes such as market crowds and fencing duels. During this time Bridgman was prolific in canvases, oil sketches, and drawings, often painting from his own photographs. Although he continued to travel in North Africa for the next five years, he still participated in the Paris Salons and exhibitions in London. A visit to Algeria with Charles Sprague Pearce brought about portrayals of Islamic monuments, street life and a journey up the Nile. The presence of Americans and Europeans in late nineteenth century Algeria was not unusual, as Algiers was a French colony at the time. For example, Pierre-August Renoir, like Bridgman and Pearce, was a frequent visitor to Algiers and similarly depicted traditionally dressed Algerians in a setting of Islamic architecture.
 
Throughout the next ten years Bridgman continued in the Orientalist style. He also worked with society portraiture, symbolism, and historical and Biblical themes, but did no have as much success as with his Orientalist works. The end of the nineteenth century brought several personal exhibitions and noteworthy sales, establishing Bridgman as a leading Orientalist painter. His work was praised for such qualities as honesty and freshness. He published two books, Winters in Algeria in 1890 and L’Anarchie dans l’Art, describing his thoughts on Impressionism, in 1898. Frederick Arthur Bridgman passed away in 1928 in Rouen, France.

There were a few key movements and events that gave birth to the American Abstract movement and Byron Browne was part of all of them. Hans Hoffman played a significant role when he opens his school of painting in New York which Browne attended in 1935. In 1936 he is one of the artists that formed the American Abstract Artist Group which included Lassaw, Gorky, de Kooning and Greene. Browne was a peer to Arshile Gorky and John Graham and these artists had a great rapport. This was one of the first formalized groups for abstraction in America and they held exhibitions from 1937 to 1962 for abstract painting.

Browne’s work from the 1930’s and 1940’s is exceptional. Browne clearly looked to France and the work of Pablo Picasso and George Braque for inspiration. And as he moved into the 1940’s the influence of Joan Miro is reflected as well. 

 

 

 

Carpeaux was one of the greatest sculptors of the nineteenth century. He influenced an entire generation of sculptors to come including Rodin, who was his pupil. Ironically, Rodin and Carpeaux had their works done in large editions during their lifetime and afterwards. This has led to their being very well recognized by the public yet at the same time, creating confusion as to when works were cast, in what numbers and at what date.

Carpeaux is often celebrated along with Carriere-Belleuse and Clodion as being at their best in terracotta. It was a medium that suited Carpeaux’s work and style and he executed many of sculptures in this medium. The original modelings that he did when working through a composition usually have a rougher, artistic feel to the surface.