Frank Duveneck

Paintings by Frank Duveneck

Born in October of 1848 in Covington, Kentucky, Frank Duveneck was an American etcher and painter. He began painting in his early teens and was employed as an assistant to Wilhelm Lamprecht, a graduate of Munich’s Royal Academy who began a mission to decorate churches in the Cincinnati region. In 1869, Duveneck traveled to Munich where he intended to continue his study of church decoration.

After developing an interest in easel painting, Duveneck enrolled in 1870 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under painters and illustrators Wilheim Diez and Alexander Strähuber.. Gaining distinction for his work, Duveneck won a prize in 1872 that entitled him to a studio of his own. Some of his best known works were painted during his time in Germany, including his 1872 “Whistling Boy”. one of Duveneck’s first renditions of working-class ruffians, now housed in the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Frank Duveneck’s work of this period are painted in a vigorous style that reveals the influence of Wilhelm Leibi, who was the leader of a group of young German realists guided by French realist Gustave Courbet’s innovative and social-themed work. Duveneck’s early style, with its generally dark colors and expressive brushwork, was a melding of contemporary German practice with his interest in the techniques of the Old Masters, particularly the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters.

Duveneck returned to Cincinnati in 1873, and, in the following year, exhibited portraits he had painted in Germany. His reputation as an artist in the United States began with a successful 1875 Boston exhibition of his work where his bold and spontaneous style caused a sensation. Despite encouragement to stay in Boston and paint commissioned portraits, Duveneck returned to Germany where he set up a studio in Munich and began to develop a reputation among its American students.

After a trip to Venice in 1877, Frank Duveneck opened his own painting school in Munich, which soon drew the attention of studying artists. His students, who would become known as the Duveneck Boys, included such future artists as portrait painter and illustrator John White Alexander, and impressionist landscape painters Theodore Wendel and John H. Twachtman. In 1879 Duveneck and his students traveled to Italy, where they would remain for the next two years spending winters in Florence and summers in Venice.

Duveneck was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1880. Around this time, he became interested in etching and produced several works in this medium which were similar in style to those of James Whistler, whom Duveneck had met in Venice. This collection of works were exhibited in a London exhibition in 1881. After 1880 Duveneck altered his painting style to one of lighter colors and less somber lighting effects, which might have been a response to his stay in Italy.

In March of 1886, Frank Duveneck married Elizabeth Boott, one of his students. They lived at Villa Casteliani in Florence for two years and had one son, Frank Boott Duveneck. After his wife’s 1988 death of pneumonia in Paris, Duveneck made the decision to return in the following year to the United States. He taught painting classes at Cincinnati, New York and Chicago, and frequently traveled to Europe throughout the 1890s. Duveneck became a teacher at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1890 and became a regular faculty member in 1900. He was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1905, and became a full Academician in 1906.

Duveneck exhibited his works in a private room at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition held in San Francisco; his works were received with great acclaim, and he was awarded a Special Gold Medal of Honor. Before his death in Cincinnati on January 2, 1919, Frank Duveneck donated a large and important group of his works to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which remains the center for Duveneck studies. His works can be seen at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Top Insert Image: J. Land, Portrait of Frank Duveneck, 1877, Detail, Photographic Sepia Print on Cabinet Card, Smithsonian Institution

Middle Insert Image: Frank Duveneck, “Study for ‘The Harem Guard”, 1879, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 66 cm, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco

Bottom Insert Image: Frank Duveneck, “Self-Portrait”, 1877, Oil on Canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum

Gustave Caillebotte

Paintings by Gustav Caillebotte

French painter and art collector Gustave Caillebotte was born in 1848 in Paris to Céleste Daufresne and Martial Caillebotte, a wealthy textile mill owner. He began drawing and painting at a young age on his family’s estate in Yernes, located south of Paris. Caillebotte studied law, completing his law degree in 1868, and received his law license in 1870. Soon after his graduation, he was drafted to serve in the Franco-Prussian war as a member of the Garde Nationale de la Seine from July of 1870 to March of 1871.

Following the war, Caillebotte decided to pursue an artistic career. He visited the studio of Realist academic-painter Léon Bonnat, who reinforced his decision to take art as a serious career. In 1872, Caillebotte enrolled at the Êcole des Beaux-Arts and studied under Bonnat; however, he spent most of the time painting in his own studio at the family home. Within a short period of time, Caillebotte suffered several losses in his family life: his father died in 1874, his brother Rene in 1876, and his mother died in 1878. The family fortune was divided between the remaining two brothers, Gustave and Martial, both of whom agreed to the sale of the Yerres estate and moved to an apartment in Paris.

Beginning in 1874, Gustave Caillebotte met and befriended several artists who were working outside the influence of the Academie des Beaux-Arts; these artists included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Augustus Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Giuseppe De Nittis. Caillebotte made his artistic debut in 1876 at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, a show that would establish him as an indispensable figure in the group both artistically and financially. This loosely knit group of impressionist, avant-garde artists rejected the academic style of painting and the formality of the official Salon’s traditional exhibition protocols.

Caillebotte’s style, which so outraged the contemporary critics and academics, conversely inspired later artists to use some of his more radical compositional techniques. His paintings often contained highly unusual perspectives, such as viewpoints looking up from below at a slanting floor, and viewpoints gazing down from an indistinctive perch or standing on the edge of an intimate scene. Caillebotte also cropped his protagonists and scenes in an unconventional manner, such as the foreground figures in his 1877 “Rue de Paris; Temps de Pluie” and 1878 “The Painter Under His Parasol” whose lower body portions are beyond the image plane. These innovative techniques became features of future avant-garde artists from Van Gogh to Pablo Picasso.

Caillebotte helped finance and organize the Third Impressionist exhibition, in which he exhibited eight paintings. Included in this show was his best known work, the 1875 “Floor Scrapers”, which had been rejected and deemed vulgar by the official Salon in 1875 for its depiction of common laborers. Caillebotte played a major role as a source of patronage and financial support for artists, such as Monet and Pissarro who were still endeavoring to achieve more widespread success. His family wealth enabled his to pursue his own artistic career and provide support for his artistic friends whose means were limited; it also enabled him to collect their work, often purchased at inflated prices. In 1876 Caillebotte purchased several works by Monet, and also paid the rent for some of his friends’ studios. He was also a major force in convincing the Louvre Museum to purchase Édouard Manet’s 1863 controversial painting “Olympia”, which had caused a scandal at the Salon’s 1865 exhibition for its cold and prosaic treatment of the female nude.

In 1877, Caillebotte was the central organizer of the Third Impressionist Exhibition, which now had become an independent, unofficial and distinctly avant-garde salon. Although an important force in the avant-garde movement, his work did not explore the effects of light as did the other members’ work. Caillebotte was more a Realist in style, more aligned with the early works of Monet, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. He exhibited seventeen paintings at the seventh impressionist exhibition and, along with Monet, refused to participate in the final 1886 exhibition due to tensions between artists.

Gustave Caillebotte relocated to a property in Petit-Gennevilliers, a suburb on the Seine River, in 1881. A former yacht racer, he became active in constructing yachts and spent a majority of his time discussing philosophy, politics, literature and art with his brother Martial and good friend Augustus Renoir. By the early 1890s, Caillebotte was barely painting; he had stopped producing the large canvases for which he was known in the previous decades. In 1894, at the age of forty-five, while working in his home garden, Caillebotte collapsed and died suddenly of a stroke. He is buried at the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery in southeastern Paris.

Following his death, Caillebotte’s estate, in keeping with his will, attempted to make a generous donation of his large collection of paintings, which contained both his and other artists’ works, to the French State. The 1894 donation spurred controversy, which emphasized the still prevalent French Academy’s resistance to avant-garde art and artists. Academy officials, with the artist Jean-Leon Gerome in the lead, attempted to prevent the transfer of the works by the Impressionists and the important Post-Impressionists, such as Paul Cézanne, to the French National Museum.

These impressionist works had been consistently refused admission to the official Salons through the years; and the art establishment continued to oppose acceptance of what they referred to as unhealthy art. Only a portion of the works in the collection, of which only two were by Caillebotte, were ultimately accepted. In 1911, nearly thirty works from Caillebotte’s collection were purchased by Albert C. Barnes, an American physician, businessman, and art collector; these works form the core of the extensive collection of Modernist works at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Until the 1950s, when Caillebotte family members began selling works from their private collection, including paintings by Caillebotte as well as works by other artists he had acquired, Caillebotte’s work was for the most part forgotten. Most of these works from the private collections were eventually purchased by Albert Barnes in 1954 and added to the Barnes Foundation. With the purchase of Caillebotte’s 1877 “Paris Street, Rainy Day” by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964, the work of Caillebotte was brought again to the attention of collectors and the public.

Tope Insert Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “Self Portrait”, 1892, Oil on Canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Second Insert Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “The Orange Trees”, 1878, Oil on Canvas, 154.9 x 116.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Third Insert Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann”, 1880, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 62 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madird

Bottom Insert Image: gustave Caillebotte, “Self Portrait in the Park at Yerres”, 1875-1878, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 48 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Peter Churcher

Paintings by Peter Churcher

Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1964, Peter Churcher is a portrait and figurative painter in the realist tradition. He holds a Bachelor of Music with Honors from Melbourne University which he acquired in 1986. Traveling through Europe after gaining his Licentiate for Piano Performance from Trinity College in London, Churcher visited many galleries and decided to return to his original passion, painting. He studied at Melbourne’s Victorian College, now Deacon University, where in 1992 he earned his BFA in Painting.

Churcher first showed his work in the group exhibition “Artworks II: Thirty Emerging Melbourne Artists” held at the South Melbourne Town Hall. After entering his work in two group exhibitions at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, he gave his first solo show at the gallery in 1994. Since that time Churcher has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and has been represented in many group exhibitions across the country.

Peter Churcher’s work deals primarily with the human subject in portraiture and group figurative narratives. His subjects are ordinary people sighted on the streets, who are presented on the canvas with their own personalities and natural enthusiasms. A number of commissioned portraits for both private and public personalities are also contained in Churcher’s body of work.

As a commissioned officer during the Persian Gulf War, Churcher was, in 2002, appointed to be Australia’s official war artist. Traveling to the Persian Gulf and Diego Garcia, he recorded the people and operations of the Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force. Churcher’s work captured many aspects of army life not covered by the press photographers. His images of Australia’s flying officers and pilots, the sailors, and the engine-room stokers aboard the HNAS Kanimbla are now included in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

Peter Churcher’s work is represented in many major public, corporate and private collections throughout Australia and overseas including the National Gallery of Australia and The National Portrait Gallery, both in Canberra; The Australian War Memorial; and Parliament House in Victoria, among others.

Peter Churcher is represented in Australia by Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. He is currently living and working in Barcelona, Spain. Churcher’s most recent solo show is at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art in Melbourne through April 16th of 2021.

Top Insert Image: Peter Churcher, “Hostel”m 2017, Oil on Canvas, 116 x 98 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Churcher, “The Young Painter”, 2014, Oil on Canvas, 78 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Walter Stuempfig

Paintings by Walter Stuempfig

Walter Stuempfig was one of Philadelphia’s most highly regarded painters of the mid-twentieth century. He is known primarily for his landscapes of the Philadelphia area and the shores of New Jersey. Stuempfig’s work is often pervaded with a sense of poetic melancholy that has led to his frequent classification as a romantic realist.

Born in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in January of 1914, Walter Stuempfig’s initial education was at the Germantown Academy from which he graduated in 1930. He spent a year studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania before enrolling, in October of 1931, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Stuempfig studied under modernist illustrator and painter Henry McCarter, the impressionist landscape painter Daniel Garber and realist landscape painter Francis Speight.

In 1934, Stuempfig won the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship for study abroad. He traveled frequently to Europe, and he was deeply influenced by the European masters, particularly Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. From his initial exhibition in 1932 until 1966, Stuempfig regularly exhibited in the annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy. He had his first successful exhibition, as an American realist painter, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1942 “Artists for Victory” show.

Discovered by art gallery director R. Kirk Askew, Stuempfig had his first one man show in 1943 at the Durlacher Brothers Gallery in New York. His show was sold out on opening night, with both the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art adding his work to their collections. Stuempfig continued to be represented by the Durlacher Brothers Gallery through 1961. In 1947, the Corcoran Gallery purchased his painting “Two Houses” which had won second prize in the biennial competition that year for contemporary American paintings.

Walter Stuempfig had married his wife Lila Hill, a sculptor who also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, in 1935. Upon his wife’s death in 1946, he concentrated more intensely on his artwork. working from his studio in the Chestnut Hill area of northwest Philadelphia. Stuempfig would spend his summers painting at New Jersey’s shore area and the Manayunk area of Philadelphia. In 1948, he became an instructor in drawing and composition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where he taught until his death, after a long illness, in November of 1970.

As a painter, Walter Stuempfig worked independently, and remained outside the mainstream of the contemporary artistic movements. He was a prolific artist, producing over fifteen hundred works of figure compositions, landscapes and architectural subjects, portraits, and still lifes, all done in the style of romantic realism. Stuempfig had a subtle and polished painting technique; his figurative work had a great subjectivity, which was often infused with nostalgia and personal sentiment.

Walter Stuempfig’s paintings can be found in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Top Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Queen of the Seas Casino”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 48.1 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Sturgeon”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Matthijs Röling

Paintings by Matthijs Röling

Born in Oostkapelle, The Netherlands, in 1943, Matthijs Nicolaas Röling is a figurative painter, lithographer and academy lecturer who has carried on the tradition of realistic painting, enriching its language with artistic techniques derived from surrealism.

Röling received his training at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 1960 to 1963; he continued his studies at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam in 1963 to 1964 . He had his first exhibition in 1965 at the Drents Museum in the city of Assen . In 1972, Röling became a lecturer at the Academie Minerva in Groningen where he taught such future artists as realist painters Jan van der Kooi, Douwe Elias, and Peter Pander. Röling has also lectured at the Classical Academy for Fine Art, also in Groningen.

Matthijs Röling first achieved recognition for his work in 1976 with his series of still-lifes, entitled “Cabinets”. In 1983 he began working on large-scale decorative projects, such as monumental canvases and wall and ceiling paintings. In recent years these projects have come to occupy an increasingly important place within Röling’s highly diverse body of work.

Röling’s first large-scale, oil on panel mural, entitled “De Sterrenhemel (The Starry Sky)”, was finished in 1983. The mural is located at the Café De Eenhoorn in the city of Eelde, and consists of four horizontal panels, each panel depicting a section of the night sky with its zodiac symbols and measuring 196 x 173 x 16 centimeters. In a 1987 collaboration with Northern-realist painter Wout Muller, Matthijs Röling produced the mural “Boom van Kennis (Tree of Knowledge)”, which is installed in the auditorium of the Academy Building at the University of Groningen.

Since 1962, Matthijs Röling has been regularly exhibiting his work in museums and galleries throughout the Netherlands, including Amsterdam’s galleries M.L. de Boer and Galerie Mokum, and Groningen’s Galerie Wiek XX. Röling received the Dr. AH Heineken Prize for Art in 1994 for his short operatic work. The Drents Museum in Assen houses a number of Röling’s paintings and sketchbooks in its collection.

T M Davy

The Artwork of T M Davy

Born in New York, New York in 1980, T M Davy is a painter whose body work is characterized by realistic oil portraits. Davy studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he currently teaches. In 2012 , he was an artist in residence at BOFFO in Fire Island, New York.

T M Davy’s work relies on scenes that are directly connected to his life and surroundings. Persistent themes in his work are the issues of intimacy, love, and friendship. Past subjects in his work have included candle-lit scenes of domestic life with family, his husband Liam, and his circle of friends. Davy has also painted a series of images centered on horses, inspired by the time he spent on a relative’s farm, and a series of images of candles lit in darkness.

The consistency of Davy’s technical execution and the sophistication of its realism are apparent in his oil on canvas work, whether in a small or a large-scale format. A connecting link in all of his paintings is his use of the chiaroscuro effect, a technique used also by painters Caravaggio and Anthony van Dyck, which emphasizes the interaction of light and shadow.He has also worked in the mediums of pastel and gouache, with which he produced several series of open air spontaneous drawings in a smaller scale format.

In his work produced on Fire Island, New York, Davy portrays many of his beachside figures entering or in the water, exemplifying the union of bodies with nature, a prominent theme of the artist. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond among close friends. His “Fire Island” series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

Davy’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the “No Soul for Sale” exhibition at theTate Modern in London; the “B-Out” exhibition at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York; the 2009 “Nudes” exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in São Paolo; and the 2019 “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany in 2018: the Exile gallery in Berlin, Germany, 2012; and gallery 11R in New York in 2014 and 2017.

“We exist in an age of complete transition. The time is now to communicate the beauty of queer love around the world. A paradigm shift in people’s conception of love is happening. If I can, I want to play a small part in that–in revealing how true and how eternal it is. Transcendence is a movement to the broadest spectrum. “ —T M Davy, 2019

Information of T M Davy’s work and exhibitions can be found at the artist’s site: http://www.tmdavy.com

Michael Triegel

The Artwork of Michael Triegel

Born in December of 1968 in Erfurt, Michael Triegel is a German painter, illustrator and graphic artist based in Leipzig. From 1990 to 1997, Michael Triegel studied at the renowned Hochschule fьr Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, where he was taught by Arno Rink, a painter in the German figurative tradition.

The Academy in Leipzig is closely associated with the New Leipzig School, a movement in German art that arose following the fall of the Berlin Wall, of which the painter Neo Rauch, a proponent of social realism, is the most important representative.The members of this association largely use the same figurative form language, though they vary widely in terms of their technique.

In terms of their subject matter and execution, Michael Triegel’s paintings are instilled with the atmosphere of the early European Renaissance. He works in the style of the old masters, applying layer upon layer with a very refined technique that compliments his ability for realistic detail. Triegel’s paintings are a celebration of pure figurative painting, with classic religious and profane motifs, which look like altarpieces but, at the same time, appear alienating and surreal.

In 2010, Michael Triegel, commissioned by the Bishop of Regensburg, painted the official portrait of Pope Benedict XVI, which resulted in international recognition of his work.

Insert Image: Michael Triegel, “Hermes”, 2008, Mixed Media on Linen

Romer Kitching

Paintings by Romer Kitching

Born in London in 1995, painter Romer Kitching began drawing at an early age. From 2015 to 2018, he received his formal education at the Florence Academy of Art, a school which offers classical training in the Realist style. Having been trained daily in the aspects of form, anatomy, and the effects of light, Kitching now paints exclusively from live models.

Romer Kitching currently resides in Cèret, a communal town in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of southern France. Having visited the area from the age of fourteen, he considers it his home and has painted many ‘open air’ landscapes of the area. Painting to capture the different elements of the area, Kitching pays particular attention to the broken light and the dappled shadows in the scene.

Romer Kitching produced a number of academic portraits during his time at the Florence Academy, using live models to increase his skills. In addition to this work, he has painted more intimate, stylized portraits of family members and friends.

Romer Kitching’s website is located at: https://www.romerkitching.com

Andreas Leissner

Paintings by Andreas Leissner

Born in Berlin in 1978, Andreas Leissner is a figurative painter of the realist style, who documents the isolation of humans in the modern world, using strict, controlled, almost stolid images. In his more recent works, he finds his points of reference in the great works of European occidental culture, recognizable in the themes of his paintings.

From 1996 to 1998, Andreas Leissner studied with figurative realist painter André Krigar. He later studied, from 1999 to 2004, under painter and graphic artist Volker Stelzmann at Berlin’s University of the Arts. After graduating with his MFA in 2004, Leissner began a career as a freelance artist.

Andreas Leissner has exhibited solely and in group shows in galleries and museums including: the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen; the Art Association of Plön, Germany; the Art Association of Mainz; and the historical Spandau Citadel in Berlin.

Based in Brandenburg, Germany, Andreas Leissner is represented by Gallery KK, founded in 1983 by Klaus Kiefer and located in Essen, Germany. The gallery is focused on figurative contemporary art. It is located at: https://www.galerie-kk.de

Andreas Leissner’s website is located at: https://andreasleissner.com

Claudio Bravo Camus

Claudio Bravo Camus, “Antes del Juego (Before the Game)”, 1983, Oil on Canvas, 199 x 239 cm

Born in 1936, Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo initially established himself as a society portrait painter in Chile and Spain, but he became better known for his vibrant still lifes of such everyday items as packages, crumpled paper, and draped fabric. Although he lived in Morocco for many years, it was the Spanish classical masters who inspired the provocative style of his hyperrealist paintings.

Though Bravo had some training under Chilean artist Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, he was primarily self-taught. He was only 17 years old when he had his first exhibition in 1954 at Salón 13 in Valparaíso. In the early 1960s Bravo moved to Spain, where he made his living painting portraits on commission, including pictures of Gen. Francisco Franco’s family members.

Bravo had his first New York City show in 1970. Two years later he settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he began to paint landscapes and animals as well as still lifes and portraits. His paintings regularly sold for impressive sums, with his 1967 “White Package” fetching more than $1 million in 2004. Bravo was, although, little known in Chile until a 1994 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. He passed away in June of 2011 in Taroudant, Morocco.

Joseph Hirsch

Joseph Hirsch, “Mercy Ship”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 97 cm , US Navy Art Collection

Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Joseph Hirsch won a four-year scholarship from the city of Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He studied the realist tradition of painter Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts. After graduation, Hirsch studied privately in New York City under social realist painter George Luks, a founder of the Ashcan School of painting and one of the “Eight”, a group which favored painting scenes of urban life.

After the death of George Luks in 1933, Hirsch studied with painter Henry Hensche, who impressed with the colors of the impressionists, had started his own studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The awarding of a Woolley Fellowship in 1935 enabled Hirsch to expand his experiences by traveling throughout Europe for one year. He visited Egypt and areas of Asia before his return to the United States in November of 1936. During the 1930s, Joseph Hirsch’s art career received a boost through employment with the Works Progress Administration in Philadelphia, for whom he completed murals for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and the city’s Municipal Court.

During World War II as a member of the Associated American Artists, Hirsch worked for Abbott Laboratories where he produced artworks to illustrate the war effort. The most widely produced war bond poster was his 1942 “Till We Meet Again”. Continuing his style of capturing ordinary people and moments, Hirsch worked with fellow artist Georges Schreiber at the Pensacola Naval Air Station documenting Naval aviation training. From there he went to the South Pacific to document the efforts of Navy medicine and, later, covered Army operations on the Italian front and in North Africa.

Joseph Hirsch was a founding member of the Artists Equity, organized in 1949 in New York City to protect the rights of visual artists. Awarded a 1949 Fulbright Fellowship, Hirsch and his family resided for a period in France for study and work. During this time, the political climate in the United States became hostile to those holding unpopular views. This led to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech in 1950 denouncing Communists in the US State Department. Awarded a year extension on his Fellowship, Hirsch sold his Cape Cod home and remained with his family in Paris.

In March of 1952 on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman George Dondero denounced Artist Equity as a front organization for Communists. This resulted in blacklisting a number of Artist Equity member artists and the denouncement of Hirsch as a Communist sympathizer. Due to this action, Hirsch and his family did not return to the United States until 1955. After his return, Hirsch continued his successful career of selling paintings and working on commissions. In the 1960s to 1970s, Hirsch experimented by using a series of layered image planes, instead of lines of perspective, to suggest depth on his canvases. This series of figurative images appear as snapshots that captured its subjects in mid-action instead of posed postions.

Joseph Hirsch taught at the National Academy of Design from 1959 to 1967, and the Art Students League of New York from 1967 until his death in September of 1981, He was also artist-in-residence a the University of Utah, Utah State University, Dartmouth College and Brigham Young University. The Library of Congress twice awarded him the Joseph Pennell Prize for Lithography for his 1944 “Lunch Hour” and the 1945 “The Confidence”. Among many other awards, he won the 1968 Carnegie Prize by the Carnegie Museum of Art for his body of work.

Note: Joseph Hirsch’s 1943 “Mercy Ship” depicts the U.S. Navy Hospital ship, USS Solace, with its crew. Functioning as a floating medical treatment facility, the Navy’s hospital ships operated under the laws laid down by the Geneva Convention, as such they were unarmed, fully illuminated at night, and painted white.

Built as the passenger ship SS Iroquois in 1927, it was acquired by the US Navy in July of 1940, renamed Solace, converted into a hospital ship, and commissioned on August 9, 1941. She was at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack, December 7th of 1941, where she pulled men from the burning oil-covered water and evacuated crews of damaged ships. The USS Solace received seven battle stars for her distinguished service in World War II.

Top Insert Image: Juley & Son, “Joseph Hirsch”, 1959,Juley&Son, Gelatin Silver Print, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Second Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Window in Spring”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 111.8 x 60.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “The Naked Man”, 1959-1962, Oil on Canvas, 188.6 x 130.1 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Satisfaction Plus”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 109.2 x 129.5 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command Museum

Daniel Graves

Daniel Graves, “The Power of Wisdom and Beauty”, 2013, Oil on Linen, 70 x 50 cm

Born in 1949, Daniel Graves graduated with honors in 1972 from Balimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied anatomy and painting under painter Joseph Sheppard and sculptor Frank Russell. He traveled to Florence, Italy, studying history painting and etching with classical artist Richard Serrin at Florence’s Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art from 1972 to 1973.

Moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Daniel Graves studied in the atelier of classical realist painter Richard Lack from 1975 to 1976, where he associated with a thriving circle of classical realist painters trained by Lack and Ives Gammell, a classical realist painter of symbolic images. Graves moved to Florence in 1978, decided to remain there and began working under Nerina Simi, renowned painter and drawing teacher. During that time he became acquainted with portrait and fresco painter Pietro Annigoni, who has received praise for his classical portraits of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1982, Daniel Graves, with his compatriot, painter and historian Charles H Cecil, a student of Ives Gammell, opened a teaching atelier in Florence which they operated together until 1990. Graves created the Florence Academy of Art in 1991 to train artists in the materials, techniques, and craftsmanship of figurative realism. Today the Academy operates ateliers in Jersey City, New Jersey, and in Mölndal, Sweden.

“When we look into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait, how much closer can we get to knowing the soul of another human being? Rembrandt’s hands mixed the paint we see, but what is actually before us is a blend of his image with ours and that of every human. There is no substitute for this experience.” —-Daniel Graves

Image reblogged with thanks to https://danielgravesart.com

The Florence Academy of Art’s website is https://www.florenceacademyofart.com

Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme, “A Bischari Warrior”, 1872, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 33 cm, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire

Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor of the academicism style, painting historical themes, portraits, Greek mythology, and oriental and Middle-East themes. He studied under the historical painter Paul Delaroche and later attended the atelier of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss artist who took over Delaroche’s studio in 1843. Gérôme attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but failed to enter the notable Prix de Rome due to inadequacy in his drawing skill.

Gérôme won a third-class medal at the 1847 Paris Salon Exhibition for his 1846 painting “The Cock Fight”, which is viewed as a high point of the Neo-Grec movement. He took a second-class medal at the 1948 Prix de Rome Exhibition for his painting “Bacchus and Cupid”. Gérôme received two important commissions between 1852 and 1854 which enabled him to widely travel: the large historical canvas, “The Age of Augustus”, for the court of Napolean III, and his “Last Communion of Saint Jerome” for the Church of Saint-Séverin in Paris.

Jean-Léon Gérôme visited Egypt in 1856 for the first time, traveling up the Nile to Cairo, across the Sinai Peninsula, and eventually to Damascus. This trip began the start of his many orientalist paintings depicting the Arab religion, landscapes of the North African regions, and genre life of the its peoples. He made multiple studies and sketches of the landscapes and gathered costumes and artefacts as studies for his oriental scenes. Between 1864 and 1904 Gérôme taught at his own atelier at the École des Beaux-Arts, one of three professors, teaching his students a progession of drawing skills before they were allowed to work in oils.

Jean-Léon Gérôme died in his atelier on the 10th of January 1904. He was found in front of a portrait of Rembrandt and close to his own painting “Truth Coming Out of Her Well”. At his own request, he was given a simple burial service. But the Requiem Mass given in his memory was attended by a former president of the Republic, most prominent politicians, and many painters and writers. Gérôme is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in front of the statue “Sorrow” that he had cast for his son Jean who had died in 1891.

Dennis Wojtkiewicz

Dennis Wojtkiewicz is Professor of Art at Bowling Green State University where he has taught painting and drawing since 1988. He received his M.F.A. degree from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1981 and also studied at the Atelier Neo-Medici in France under the direction of Patrick Betaudier in 1978 and 1983.

Wojtkiewicz is best known for his distinctive large-scale oil paintings of fruit and flowers in which the subject matter is encapsulated and transfixed by a heightened approach to realism. His work has been shown in international art fairs in Bridgehampton, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Palm Beach, Santa Fe, Taipei and Toronto as well as in numerous galleries and exhibitions throughout the U.S. Wojtkiewicz is a past recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Fellowships with paintings and drawings represented in major public, private and corporate collections.

Erik de Jong

Erik de Jong, “Owl (Eule)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Panel

Born in 1958, Erik de Jong finished his studies at the Minerva Academie in Groningen, Netherlands. In 1984 he decided to move to Amsterdam. De Jong had his first solo exhibition in Galerie Mokum. which has been a critical site for the exhibition of Dutch Realist painting.

De Jong has a preference for the theme of the human set in a landscape or in an interior. The people that he depicts are mostly men that are lost in thought or that are stilled in motion. In de Jong’s paintings, a distance is created between the spectator and the imaged figures in his paintings. This provides a moment of rest; but still there is a feeling of tension. The question arises as to whether there has already been an action performed or does that action still have to come.

Reality has always been the starting point of Erik de Jong’s paintings; but the border between reality and what is suggested is very thin. This is something that can be clearly seen in most of his recent paintings. Usually there are several hidden layers in the work of De Jong, requiring that the viewer look beyond the archetype images he has learned.