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Frederick Milton Grant was born in Sibley, Iowa in 1886. He lived in Chicago as an oil and watercolor landscape and still-life painter, studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with John Vanderpoel. In 1907 he traveled to Venice, Italy to become a student of William Merritt Chase and subsequently was give the annual award for best summer student. Grant followed Chase’s painterly technique and tendency towards romantic subject matter. In addition, Grant also traveled to Paris and studied Monet and Cézanne. Upon his return to Chicago, he grew into a respected member of the local art community. In 1914 he again took part in William Merritt Chase’s summer class in Carmel, California. Chase’s impact is seen particularly in the color in these later works of Grant’s. Frederick Milton Grant moved to Oakland, California in 1947 and passed away there in 1959.
 
 
Stanton MacDonald Wright, statement on Synchromisim, 1916
 
I strive to divest my art of all anecdote and illustration, and to purify it to the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic, as when listening to good music.
            Since plastic form is the basis of all enduring art, and since the creation of intense form is impossible without color, I first determined, by years of color experimentation, the relative spatial relation of the entire color gamut. By placing pure colors on recognizable forms (that is, by placing advancing colors on advancing objects, and retreating colors on retreating objects), I found that such colors destroyed the sense of reality, and were in turn destroyed by the illustrative contour. Thus, I came to the conclusion that color, in order to function significantly, must be used as an abstract medium. Otherwise, the picture appeared to me merely as a slight, lyrical decoration.
            Having always been more profoundly moved by pure rhythmic form (as in music) than by associative processes (such as poetry calls up), I cast aside as nugatory all natural representation in my art. However, I still adhered to the fundamental laws of composition (placements and displacements of mass as in the human body in movement), and created my pictures by means of color-form which, by its organization in three dimensions, resulted in rhythm.
            Later, recognizing that painting may extend itself into time, as well as a simultaneous presentation, I saw the necessity for a formal climax, which though being ever in mind as the final point of consummation, would serve as a point d’appui from which the eye would make its excursions into the ordered complexities of the picture’s rhythms. Simultaneously my inspiration to create came from a visualization of abstract forces interpreted, through color juxtaposition, into terms of the visual. In them was always a goal of finality which perfectly accorded with my felt need in picture construction. 
            By above one can see that I strive to make my art bear the same relation to painting that polyphony bears to music. Illustrative music is a thing of the past: it has become abstract and purely aesthetic, dependent for its effect upon rhythm and form. Painting, certainly, need not lag behind music. 
Mulhaupt was born in Rock Port, Missouri to German immigrant parents. He began his career as an editor to a newspaper in Dodge City, Kansas, and later moved to Kansas City where he worked as an artist’s apprentice. He enrolled at the Kansas City School of Design and in the 1890’s, began taking courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. While taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mulhaupt, along with other night students helped to found the “Palette and Chisel Club”. In 1904 Mulhaupt moved to New York where he lived at the Salmagundi Club, and shortly after, spent several years traveling in Paris. It is during his stay abroad that the focus of Mulhaupt’s artwork changed to coastal views and harbor scenes. Once Frederick J. Mulhaupt returned to the United States, he moved back into the Salmagundi Club.
 
Frederick J. Mulhaupt became a founding member of the Cape Ann School, and despite the fact that he was not a native to Massachusetts or New England, he was regarded as the “Dean of the Cape Ann School”.[1] Gloucester, Massachusetts was a booming artistic center in the early 20th century and artists such as Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Willard Metcalf and Anthony Thieme flocked there. Mulhaupt moved permanently to Gloucester in 1922.

[1] Kristian Davis, Artists of Cape Ann: A 150 Year Tradition (Massachusetts: Twin Lights Publishers, 2001) 64.

George Oberteuffer’s best and most sough-after works are those he painted during his nineteen-year stay in France. Inspired by the Luxembourg Gardens, and the architecture of northern France, Oberteuffer developed a fresh and vigorous style, using vibrant color and agile brushstrokes that was influenced by French Impressionism. 

Oberteuffer attended Princeton University and graduated in the class of 1900. After graduation, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz and William Merritt Chase and received his Master of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. While in France, Oberteuffer met his future wife, Henriette Amiard at the Academie Julian in Paris. The two often exhibited their paintings together and their careers thrived.

During Oberteuffer’s return to the United States, his paintings echoed the modern sensibilities of artists such as close friends John Marin and Arthur B. Carles. Oberteuffer then became a member of the National Academy in 1939 and died soon after in Boston due to pneumonia.
Charles Sprague Pearce lived in abroad most his life. Even though he married a French women and died in his beloved city of Auvers (Vincent Van Gogh’s Hometown), he still connected himself with Americans during his life. He became friends with expatriate artists like Paul Wayland Bartlett, the successful sculptor. Bartlett and Pearce actually exchanged a portrait and cast bronze of each other. Their friendship was strong and when the two men got married, their wives became friends as well. Pearce went on to paint several portraits of Mrs. Bartlett including this painting.
    
In 1872 Pearce was diagnosed with pulmonary disease that forced him to live in warm climates for the rest of his life. During the winter months of the 1870s Pearce and another young American painter, Frederick Arthur Bridgman whose works are in several museums across the country including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts went to Egypt. While painting oriental scenes, Pearce developed a great skill in drawing kaffiyeh. Kaffiyeh is the shawls or scarves that Egyptians wear to protect themselves from the incredible heat. His ability to draw kaffiyeh is displayed in this painting. The woman being painted is wearing a bow and a scarf and Pearce is able to display the women perfectly. Also, the personality of the woman that is given off in this painting is a technique that a contemporary commentator at the 1877 Salon in Paris explains when referring to one of Pearce’s portraits of a woman that won the gold medal. He explains how Pearce’s composition demonstrates a “certain superiority” for “the graceful inclination of the pose, the truthful restraint and soberness of flesh color, the solid handling and sound drawing, and correct but not labored finish, the clan revelation, frank, unforced and unaffected, of character” revealed “the thoughtfulness, judgment, vast knowledge, technical strength and repose of an accomplished painter.” Pearce’s skill in showing off the personality and character of his subjects is evident in this painting.
Hippolyte Petitjean, along with such artists as Dubois-Pillet, Angrand, Luce, Gausson, Cross, Schuffenecker, and Pissaro, was a flower of Seurat in the movement known as Neo Impressionism. The Neo-Impressionists employed a divisionist technique of applying paint and followed Seurat’s theories of color. Petitjean, as well as others, would exhibit together as a group known as the Independents at the Salon of the Independents beginning in 1891. They would also exhibit together in 1892 and 1893 at the Les XX in Brussels.
Ferdinand Loyen du Puigaudeau is a painter with an identity and character all his own. Though his work bears similarities to the Realist, Impressionist, Symbolist, and Romantic movements, he remained outside the mainstream of these styles. His painting appears full of contradictions; bold and yet restrained, with a mixture of technical know how and naiveté. Representative of a stylistic approach almost unknown in France, his work is even comparable to that of the American Luminist painters of the same period.

 

In 1886, du Puigaudeau made his first visit to the quiet seaside village of Pont-Aven. There he booked a room at Gloanec’s, a popular hotel for artists on a budget. It so happened that Paul Gauguin was also making his first visit and staying at the same hotel. Du Puigaudeau, along with a small number of aspiring artists were in a wholly unique position of observing and working alongside one of the most important painters of the late nineteenth century. Puigaudeau developed close relationships with Gauguin, Degas, Rysselberghe, Ensor and Bernard. Degas affectionately referred to du Puigaudeau as the Hermit of Kervaudu. This time spent at Pont-Aven would have a profound effect on the painter stylistically. He would soon enter the mature phase of his career after this experience which no doubt pushed him in a place that is still unique to this day.

Du Puigadeau’s vision comes closest to the Romantic attitude toward nature. His love of the bold colors of nature brings him close to the American Luminist painters, such as Frederick Church and his greatest predecessor, the German artist Casper David Friedrich. Yet unlike Friedrich, du Puigadeau did not paint mountains and forests in all their vertical majesty but rather the horizontal expanses of sea and sky. It was not his aim to portray man lost in an overwhelming or hostile nature, but merely to show man face to face with creation, and participate in his role as spectator.

 

Abel George Warshawsky was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on December 28, 1883. He moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio where he was enrolled in the Cleveland Art Institute and studied with Louis Rorimer. He continued his education at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York City. 

Although Warshawsky traveled back and forth to the United States, he maintained his studio in France for forty years. He experienced huge success as an artist throughout his career, and exhibited in France, Italy and the United States. After the death of his first wife in the 1930s, and the talk of war in Europe, Warshawsky moved back America and established a studio in Monterrey, California. He became the president of the Carmel Art Society, and taught classes in various arts institutions. Warshawsky created numerous impressionistic portraits and landscapes of the Northern California countryside, several of which are housed in major collections today. Abel George Warshawsky died in 1962.

Exhibitions
Carmel Art Association
Carnegie Institute/International
Corcoran Gallery
National Academy of Design
Paris Salon
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Vose Galleries, Boston
 
Associations
Carmel Art Association
Cincinnati Art Club
 
Collections
Art Institute of Chicago
Butler Institute of American Art
Cleveland Artists Foundation
Maryhill Museum of Art
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Museum of New Mexico
San Diego Museum of Art
The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie
The Cleveland Museum of Art
The John H. Vanderpoel Art Association
USC Fisher Gallery

As a young man Worthington Whittredge left his native Cincinnati, Ohio to embark on a journey to Europe in search of a teacher.  He had been painting for several years and was essentially a self-taught artist, as were most of his contemporaries in the Midwest.  It was unusual for landscape artists to seek formal training in Europe at this time; however, Whittredge was determined and became one of the first to establish this trend.

The young artist arrived in Paris in 1849.  However, the city proved too expensive for him and the Barbizon school did not impress him. Whittredge moved on to Germany and spent the next seven years studying at the county’s leading art center, the Düsseldorf School.

I found the professors of the Academy in Düsseldorf among the most liberal-minded artists I have ever met, extolling English, French, Belgian, Norwegian and Russian art. The Düsseldorf School therefore was not alone the teachings of a few professors in the Academy but of the whole mass collected at that once famous rendezvous, and America had Leutz there, the most talked about artist of them all in 1850.

While at the Düsseldorf Academy, Whittredge absorbed a variety of painting styles incorporating them into his own work. Even the Barbizon style which he had rejected earlier, had indirectly influenced the artist’s style.  After Germany, Whittredge spent a summer sketching in Switzerland and then relocated to Rome.  While in Rome he befriended Sanford R. Gifford and Albert Bierstadt.  His new friends departed the following summer, but Whittredge remained in Rome for two years.  His money soon ran out and it became necessary for Whittredge to begin selling his paintings on the open market.  The majority of these paintings were either Swiss lake scenes or views of the Roman Campagna.

Whittredge returned to America in 1859. He landed in New York and eventually set up a studio in a building on Tenth Street, an appropriate symbol of the artist’s professional stature. He soon became a member of the National Academy of Design.
Whittredge had a difficult time in the beginning, attempting to paint American landscapes using his European training. He spent months painting in the Catskills and his early attempts at painting in the Hudson River style where not promising. However, by 1961 Whittredge finds his place in the movement by painting his first major opus as a Hudson River painter, Landscape with Hay Wain. (Cleveland Museum of Art Collection)
As a young expressionist, Karel Appel’s beginnings in the art world served as a catalyst in his career. The pivotal moment in his first years as an artist came in 1947 when Appel lived in an attic in the Oudezijds area of Amsterdam. Due to a daily job, he was forced to work at night. The artist had no gas or electricity and was forced to paint in the dark. Despite the fact that Appel could rarely see the colors of the pigments, he developed as many as fifty paintings a night. He finished a work by lighting a candle, turning the painting upside down (because Appel thought no painting had a top or bottom) and splattering the center with bright pigment. This technique served as the basis of Appel’s painting – spontaneous, intuitive and powerful.
 
In July of 1948, the first meeting of the Dutch Experimental group took place. The group hoped to unite with similar artists outside of Holland. They promoted the idea of an international Avant-Garde, one which sought to liberate itself of all fixed academic theory and aestheticism. The small art circle quickly expanded with representatives in Copehagen, Brussels, and its originating city, Amsterdam. The movement named itself CoBrA after the first letters of the member’s home cities. The focus of the movement was semi-abstract painting that relied on bright, primary coloration and strong, almost violent, brush strokes. 
 
Appel rapidly detached himself from the CoBrA group in 1952. CoBrA was a significant part of Appel’s career and helped him become what he is today: the most important Dutch artist of the 20th century.