Art for the Soul
The artwork hanging in Peter King’s East Coast home brings the beauty of landscapes to a city space
The artwork hanging in Peter King’s East Coast home brings the beauty of landscapes to a city space
Peter King was 13 and a student at National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, when he bought his first landscape painting. “After camp we went to one of the local arts colonies,” he says. “i saw a kind of dirty, horizontal landscape of a sunset, trees and water—things that I love. I bought it for $15. My friend asked, ‘why are you buying that piece of junk?’ I love landscapes. I took it home and cleaned it up.”
Later, he worked at Interlochen in the summers and began to acquire land near the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, where he later built a summer home.
He says, “in spite of the fact that in the last two decades I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to acquire wellexecuted if not major works by some of the best-known names in the Hudson River and luminists schools (Gifford, Cropsey, Bierstadt, whittredge, Kensett),
I’ve acquired these works solely because I like living with them,” he explains. “Just as being outdoors on the land during the summer months nourishes my soul; these paintings feed my spirit when I’m indoors. I am a poor orphan, a man of modest means; my friendships are my riches so I have neither the need nor the desire to try to impress anyone with my paintings or anything else in part because for me to make such an attempt would be preposterous; rather it is with a spirit of humility and gratitude that I enjoy them.” He designed his Michigan home as a simple box, clad in reflective glass. “in the house that I built on that land,” he says, “there are no paintings—zero— because outside every 4-by-6-foot window there is a beautiful, everchanging landscape.
“This is not the case in the city,” he continues, “so my goal has been to bring the landscape into the house and to enjoy the as yet untaxable dividend of pleasure that these paintings pay, which I do on a daily basis. It is exciting to be surrounded by beauty and talent in any manifestation and, with art, I have always wanted the paintings to be of the room rather than in the room. Hung salon style, the paintings and their often heavy frames add a strong visual, as well as architectural, element to the space.” King’s interest in painting began even before his first purchase at the age of 13.“I had a great deal of training in art in my earliest years,” he explains. “I enjoyed oil painting but wasn’t really good at it. I couldn’t produce the Hudson River sunsets that I loved. I later realized the only way to have the art I want is to buy it.”
He says,“i started my serious buying late. I was buying in the late
’70s and ’80s but had I been able to do the kind of buying I was doing later
things would have been a lot different. The prices were less, and there was a tremendous amount of really good stuff. Later I was lucky to connect with Louis Salerno at Questroyal Fine Art who has been a tremendous help.
“I buy things that appeal to me and don’t get tired of them,” he continues. “I’ve always bought the best I could get. Some things were unsigned and unidentified but they had merit and I liked them.
“The handling of light in Wust’s Sunset Landscape, for instance, is absolutely spectacular, particularly above the distant hills at the left,” he says. “a painting of this quality and size by one of the big guns would be completely beyond my means, but my pleasure comes from the quality of the image, not the name recognition of the artist.” King has often been bothered by details in Régis Gignoux’s generically titled Cascading Waterfall among Wooded Landscape. He explains, “one interesting and totally unexpected experience associated with enjoying living with meticulously rendered, faithful-to-nature paintings and sharing them with friends has been to be told by some of my welltraveled, environmentally engaged young
friends,‘oh, wow, I’ve been there.that’s so-and-so.’at first I assumed the Gignoux was somewhere in upstate Newyork where Gignoux did much of his work. I have long been bothered by both the rocks and the trees as not seeming to belong to the Northeastern landscape. a few years ago a friend came in and immediately identified it as a place on a river out West. It is exciting to be able to add a specific location to a previously generically identified landscape, but unfortunately, in such instances, and there have been about five, I have been too stupid to write them down.
“The quality of the image not the fame of the artist has always been the determining factor,” he notes. “i have seen catalogs of collections that include every famous name in the book, but the images are very disappointing. I do not think of myself as a collector; I think of myself as someone lucky enough to be able to live, day in and day out, with brilliantly rendered landscapes of which I am the custodian until they pass to their next owners.”