Significant Works
Questroyal Fine Art’s annual catalog show gives collectors the opportunity to view and purchase some of the finest examples of American art
Questroyal Fine Art’s annual catalog show gives collectors the opportunity to view and purchase some of the finest examples of American art
George Bellows (1882-1925) was born in Columbus, Ohio, and went to Ohio State University where he was scouted to play for the
Cincinnati Reds baseball team. He opted instead to go to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri and was instrumental in organizing the Armory Show in 1913. He was well known for his gritty scenes of Newyork and boxing matches where the audience is as interesting as the pugilists themselves. After the Armory Show and the death of his father shortly after its close, Bellows and his family went to Monhegan Island, Maine, for the summer. He had visited Monhegan with Henri in 1911 and Maine later became a summer retreat for several years.
In 1913 he painted Between
Moon and Sun, a scene that shows his fascination with light and his characteristic bravura brushstrokes of thickly applied, almost sculptural paint. The painting is in the catalog Important American Paintings XX: Truth at Questroyal Fine Art in New York, available in early October.the gallery’s owner, Louis M. Salerno, urges collectors to visit the gallery. “with a bit of luck,” he says, “you may come upon a canvas that you may wish to
live with.the one that you might sit before with a glass of wine that reminds you of where you might find your true north. Great art can do this.”
Questroyal’s Important American Paintings catalogs are always a feast for the eyes and an opportunity to see fine examples of the breadth of American art as well as to compare the techniques of the country’s best painters.
Also in the exhibition is In the Birches, 1974 to 1977, by Luigi Lucioni (19001988). He immigrated to the United States in 1911 and eventually settled invermont. Electra Havemeyer Webb, founder of the Shelburne Museum, commissioned Lucioni to paint a landscape and invited him to stay at the family’s estate on Lake Champlain.
He later wrote, “i was reborn in this majestic setting and I fell in love with Vermont.” although he admitted that he moved trees and mountains when he composed a canvas, his meticulously painted bucolic scenes of landscapes and farms have become emblematic of the Green Mountain State. He commented, “my chief desire in art...is to paint not what I see but what I know and feel about objects and nature. I try to create objects that have an existence of their own, landscapes that have space, and solid forms and figure that have life and vitality. I love detail, but not for its own sake, but as a part of big masses and design.”
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) painted Cobb Road, water Mill in April, in 1966. Porter and his family had moved to Southampton, New York, in 1949. His neighbors were the abstract expressionists Willem and Elaine de Kooning among other famous artists of the East End of Long Island. He had studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League and continued to paint in a relatively realist manner throughout the rise of abstract expressionism while absorbing some of its ideas into his work.
He wrote, “the realist thinks he knows ahead of time what reality is, and the abstract artist what art is, but it is in its formality that realist art excels, and the best abstract art communicates an overwhelming sense of reality.” Porter painted the elegant simplicity in the world around him, reducing detail and reveling in light. He wrote, “Subject matter must be normal in the sense that it does not appear sought after so much as simply happening to one.” Having found his subject, something that existed, that he didn’t set up or arrange, he said, “i was never one to paint space, I paint air.”