John Martini, Jr. (J. D. Martini)

Pair of Hudson Highland Views by John Martini, Jr. (Fl. 1890 s, American)

1894

Impressive early American modernist abstract oil painting. Framed. Oil on canvas. Signed. Image size, 9.25H by 15L. Artist Bio: This following biography was researched, compiled...

Gorgeous tonalist oil painting woman walking in field by pond with home in background by Willis Seaver Adams (American, 1844-1921), circa 1880. Trees and an amazing sky in the background add depth and interest to this beautiful piece. Signed "W. S. Adams" lower right corner. Condition: Previous restoration includes relining of canvas. Frame is vintage gilt molded and wood frame and shows previous repair of molding losses. Image size: 20"H x 24"W. Auctions records for the artist exceed $6,000. Willis Seaver Adams was known for his landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley. A relative recluse for much of his artistic life, his loneliness can be seen in much of his works. Oil miniatures were the focus for almost all of his later works. He is credited with over 425 oils, watercolors, and drawings. Willis Seaver was born in 1844 on a farm in Suffield, near the Connecticut River. He intermittently attended the Suffield Academy, and always wanted to be a painter. A wealthy doctor became his patron, and financed his studies in 1868 at the Royal Academy in Antwerp. When the doctor passed away, Adams returned home and struggled to make a living painting. After working for a photographer for three years, he opened his own studio. Adams helped organize Cleveland's first watercolor exhibit in 1876. Soon thereafter, he completed a portrait of Rutherford B. Hayes, then governor of Ohio, prior to his becoming President of the United States. This portrait enhanced Adams notoriety. In 1878, Adams traveled to Italy where he opened a studio in Venice, and became friendly with neighbor James Whistler. Prior to returning to Springfield, Adams lived in Florence, Italy for three years. He returned to became an instructor for the Springfield Art Association, and began to exhibit his works at the galleries of James D. Gill. His first one-man exhibit was held there in 1894. Other successful exhibitions took place in Chicago, New York, and Boston. Although his works garnered respectable prices and reflected his success, Adams felt he was due more recognition. In 1906, he moved to Greenfield, Massachusetts and converted a barn into a studio. There, he fell into relative obscurity, accompanied mainly by his dog, Collie. In 1921, Adams passed away. Examples of Willis Adams works can be seen at the Kent Memorial Library, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Suffield Academy. Several Suffield residents are thought to own Adams paintings.

Harrison Bird Brown (1831 - 1915) Grand Manan Oil on canvas 12 x 20 inches Signed with initials lower left Harrison Bird Brown was born in 1831 in Portland, Maine, and is best known for his White Mountain landscapes and marine paintings of Maine's Casco Bay...

William Edward Norton (1843 - 1916) Ship Portrait, 1876 Oil on canvas 10 x 16 inches Signed and dated lower left Born in Boston, William Norton became a noted marine painter, stirred by his youth when he sailed on family-owned ships. He studied at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and with George Inness, and then established a studio in Boston. In the early 1870s, he went to Paris and became a student with Chevreuse and A. Vollon, and then he settled in London where he exhibited throughout the last quarter of the 19th century. His reputation there was based on his scenes of the Thames River, and ocean and coastal views. In 1901, he and his wife returned to the United States and settled in New York City. He also painted at Monhegan Island, Maine, where a treacherous ledge on the southern side of the island is named "Norton's Ledge" for him. He was a member of the Boston Art Club with whom he exhibited from 1873 to 1909. He also exhibited with the Pennsylvania Academy, the Royal Academy in London, the Paris Salon, the 1893 Chicago Exposition...

James Brade Sword (1839 - 1915) Couple in the Field Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches Signed lower left After a childhood in Macao, China, James Brade Sword started out in life, after hi...

Up for sale here is a really impressive mid 19th century painting. Very fine quality and great color! Unsigned. Framed. Image size, 13 by 17.

William Hart (1823 - 1894) Pastoral Landscape, 1877 Oil on canvas 9 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches Signed and dated lower left Born in Paisley, Scotland, William Ha...

Artist: William Ongley (1836–1890) Title: Ausable Lake Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: Approx. 20 x 30 inches Signed: Lower right William Ongley, a British-born American painter a...

Alfred S. Wall (American, 1825-1896) Untitled (Building the Railroad), 1859 Oil on canvas 14 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches Signed and dated lower left For Christmas, 2008, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette featured Alfred Wall's painting, Old Saw Mill from the collection of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA. It was painted in 1851 in the town of Lilly, Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains. The newspaper description stated that "though the saw mill is long gone, it still conveys all the warmth and coziness of this time of year. The article, written by Patricia Lowry, continued: At first glance, Alfred S. Wall's painting of a saw mill in snowy woods triggers nostalgia for the coziness of a log cabin, the smell of a wood-burning fire and the warming of chilled hands and feet beside it. But as sentimental as it seems on the surface, Mr. Wall's painting has a deeper and unexpected context. This is more than a painting about sled-riding children and early industry planted in the middle of virgin forest. Intended or not, this is a painting about conquering the great divide of the Allegheny Mountains. For the third consecutive year, the Post-Gazette features a winter-scene painting on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. This year's painting, Old Saw Mill, was selected by co-publisher and editor-in-chief John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman during a visit to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Mr. Wall, listed as a portrait painter in the 1850 census, was about 26 when he painted Old Saw Mill in 1851. The self-taught artist was born in Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County, to William and Lucy Wall, who'd emigrated from England around 1820. An artistic sensibility ran in the family: William was a sculptor who carved ornate tombstones here; Alfred's children, A. Bryan and Bessie, were landscape painters, as was Alfred's older brother, William Coventry Wall. For more than a century the Walls formed a prominent art dynasty in Pittsburgh, and Alfred, eventually a partner in the city's most prestigious art gallery, was well known as a painter, dealer and restorer. In Old Saw Mill, two wood cutters, each holding an axe, meet outside the mill; one points in the direction of the forest. On the other side of the stream, one child pulls another down the hillside on a sled. Just behind the hill's slope, the roof of a building appears, perhaps the home of the sawyer. The luminous, late afternoon light comes from the northwest, casting lengthening shadows on the snow under a darkening sky. The saw mill in "Old Saw Mill" likely would have been impossible to track down had Mr. Wall, presumably, not written on the back of the painting: "old saw mill near Jct. 4, Portage RR, Pa." "There was no Junction 4," said Mike Garcia, park ranger at the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh near Gallitzen, Cambria County. "But there was an Inclined Plane No. 4 at Lilly, and there was a saw mill there." In fact, there were at least six saw mills at Lilly over the years, said longtime resident Jim Salony, president of the Lilly-Washington Historical Society. But when he saw an image of the painting, Mr. Salony had no trouble coming up with a location. While there are no known photographs of the saw mill, he believes it stood near the intersection of Portage and Washington streets, next to Bear Rock Run. Mr. Salony, retired academic dean at Mount Aloysius College, didn't know exactly when the mill was torn down, but it's been gone since at least the late 1800s. He was pleased to learn of the painting, even though that knowledge came too late for inclusion in a new book about Lilly, The Spirit of a Community, for which he served as primary author and editor. It runs to more than 700 pages. For a little town -- population 869 last year -- Lilly has a lot of history. Nestled in a bowl on the western slope of the Allegheny Mountains about 3 miles south of Cresson, Lilly was first settled in 1806 by Joseph Meyer and his family, who named their 332-acre land patent Dundee. Although the Meyers had left by 1811, other settlers followed, but the community didn't flourish until the 1830s, when the Allegheny Portage Railroad began its 23-year-run through the town. For 200 years the Alleghenies had stood as an impediment to trade and travel between Pittsburgh and the east. A canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh would change that and compete with New York's Erie Canal. But a portage railroad would have to be built, on which teams of horses would lead the canal boats over the mountains. Engineer Sylvester Welch began his surveying from the small settlement at Lilly. The railroad would require 10 inclined planes, some quite steep, between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. To build it, trees had to be cut along a 120-foot-wide right-of-way for 36 miles, along which track and engine houses had to be built. William Brown, who owned the saw mill on Bear Rock Run, built at least one of the engine houses at Inclined Plane No. 4; an 1834 contract also included fencing the dwelling lots at the head and foot of the plane. Lilly is located at what was the foot of Inclined Plane No. 4., giving the community one of its early informal names, Foot of Four. Named in 1883 for Richard Lilly, who'd completed the grist mill there, Lilly had another early name: Hemlock, so dubbed by a Portage Railroad traveler who smelled the bark stripped from the trees at the saw mill. Because there isn't another Allegheny Portage Railroad location like it, where a cut in the mountains opens into a bowl, Mr. Salony thinks it was Lilly that Charles Dickens wrote about following his trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Canal in late March 1842, describing what he saw after emerging from "the bottom of the cut": "It was very pretty while traveling, to look down into a valley full of light and softness, catching glimpses through the tree-tops of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, who we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homeward; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind." To get to Lilly, Mr. Wall may have taken the Pennsylvania Canal from his home in Allegheny City, now the North Side. He'd married young, at 21, to Sarah Carr in 1846, the same year he began his career as an artist. By 1880 they were living in a brick townhouse at 104 (later 814) Arch St., now demolished. Across the river in Pittsburgh he shared a studio at 67 Fourth Ave. with his brother William; they later moved to Burke's Building, today the city's oldest office building at 209-211 Fourth. But often they worked outdoors, sometimes as part of the colony of artists that grew up around painter George Hetzel beginning in the late 1860s at Scalp Level...

Stunning Hudson River School landscape by George Lafayette Clough (1824-1901). High Bridge and Croton Waterworks, Harlem River, ca. 1870. Oil on canvas measures 14 x 21 inches; 26 x 33 inches in original frame. Signed lower left. Old repair of small diagonal puncture measuring 1/2 inch in length to the right of ship sail. Otherwise no damage or conservation to painting. Original frame has several areas of damage and loss and will require conservation. George Lafayette Clough was born September 18, 1824, in Auburn, New York, and was that city's leading landscapist and, known as a Hudson River School painter, became Auburn's most noted resident painter of the mid-century. His mother was widowed shortly after his birth, and he was raised without paternal influence. He had little formal education and was employed by the age of ten. By age fifteen he had taken up painting, and his first and informal art influence came from the portraitist, Randall Palmer. In 1844 Clough opened his own studio in Auburn. About that time Charles Loring Elliott...