Adaa Art Dealers Association Of America Paintings

Signed "HP" at lower right, and inscribed "Eric Horsbrugh-Porter / Phyllida one week old" on verso. The overall dimensions, including the frame, are 17 x 21 5/8 inches.

Dallas artist David A. Dreyer’s eighth solo exhibition at Valley House Gallery was presented early in 2021, accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. His recent paintings are inspired ...

Oil on canvas

Kate Shepherd House of Levy, 2022 Oil and enamel on panel 20 x 14 1/2 in (50.8 x 36.8 cm) JPHB 5184

Donald Vogel’s paintings reflect his interest in seeking beauty in life and in sharing pleasure with his viewers. Vogel entreats us to "rejoice and celebrate each new day, knowing it...

Texas artist Jim Stoker began developing his confetti-splatter technique of painting in 2000 to depict his interpretations of the unique flora along the Guadalupe River, as well as t...

Donald Vogel’s paintings reflect his interest in seeking beauty in life and in sharing pleasure with his viewers. Vogel entreats us to "rejoice and celebrate each new day, knowing it...

Vera Barnett has taken on a range of themes in her works, producing multiple series of paintings inspired by phobias, famous artworks, or most recently the written word in her exhibi...

David Collins was raised in Dallas, received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently lives and works in New York City. Collins has had numerous solo exhibitions i...

This is acrylic on panel in an artist-made frame. The overall dimensions, including the frame, are 8 1/2 x 12 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches.

Allison Gildersleeve was born in Connecticut in 1970, earned her B.A. from the College of William and Mary and her M.F.A. from Bard College. Gildersleeve lives and works in Brooklyn,...

Donald Vogel’s paintings reflect his interest in seeking beauty in life and in sharing pleasure with his viewers. Vogel entreats us to "rejoice and celebrate each new day, knowing it...

The overall dimensions, including the artist-made frame, are 25 x 37 inches.

Eleanor Jones Harvey, Chief Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, writes about Bob Stuth-Wade: “Over the course of his career, Bob Stuth-Wade has examined his responses to life through landscape, still life, portraiture, and abstraction. Restlessly creative, he has explored these varied genres with equal concentration…..” Bob Stuth-Wade’s method of painting is uniquely his own, having taught himself technique; his only formal training was as a teenager with Dallas artist Perry Nichols...

Valley House Gallery is honored to present a selection of paintings from the estate of American artist, John Hartell (1902-1995). John Hartell taught two disciplines at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York: freshman architecture and graduate painting. He was a much-loved professor there from 1930 until his retirement in 1967; one of his most illustrious students is the architect Richard Meier. As an artist, Hartell's first solo exhibition was in 1937 at Kleeman Gallery in New York. He exhibited at Kraushaar Galleries in New York for four decades, beginning in 1943. The Hartell Gallery at Cornell University, under the Sibley Dome, is named for him. In describing John Hartell, the artist Michael Boyd...

signed "Mozley" at lower right

Lilly Martin Spencer was a professional artist for over sixty years, painting portraits, still lifes, miniatures, and genre scenes. In the 1850s to mid-1860s her genre scenes depicti...

Oil on canvas

abstract painting with yellow and green tones

This painting demonstrates the source of Arnoldus Bloemers’ enduring popularity. A profusion of peonies, honeysuckle, and poppies share the confines of a terracotta urn sitting on a ...

SAPERE AUDE. Dare to be wise. Immanuel Kant’s directive is embodied in the work of David Ligare. For thirty-five years, Ligare has dedicated his work to ...

Timothy Rees was fascinated with drawing throughout his youth and after high school pursued a degree in animation. The pull to painting portraits and figures was strong, however, le...

Born in 1957 and trained in Paris's École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Ruiz's career has been a rich tapestry of artistic exploration and professional achievement. His format...

large abstract oil painting on canvas green orange brown

Oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in. Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower right): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ 1926; (on the back): “OLD COUNTRY BAZAAR” / BY / WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ / 1926 RECORDED: C. H. Bonte, “122nd Annual opens at Pennsylvania Academy,” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 30, 1927 EXHIBITED: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1926, The Thirty-Ninth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, no. 174 // The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1927, The One-Hundred-and-Twenty Second Annual Exhibition, p. 37 no. 181 // The Chicago Culture Club...

Ruiz's Displacements series poignantly alludes to the tragedy of warfare and forced displacement in Colombia. By juxtaposing serene images of a man transporting his homeland in a can...

It is infrequent, to say the least, that a diagnosis of tuberculosis proves fortuitous, but that was the event, in 1921, that set Paul Starrett Sample on the road to becoming a professional artist. (The best source for an overview of Sample’s life and oeuvre remains Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene, exhib. cat., [Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, 1988] with a detailed and definitive chronology by Sample scholar, Paula F. Glick, and an essay by Robert L. McGrath. It is the source for this essay unless otherwise indicated.) Sample, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896 to a construction engineer and his wife, spent his childhood moving with his family to the various locations that his father’s work took them. By 1911, the family had landed in Glencoe, Illinois, settling long enough for Paul to graduate from New Trier High School in 1916. Sample enrolled at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where his interests were anything but academic. His enthusiasms included the football and basketball teams, boxing, pledging at a fraternity, and learning to play the saxophone. After the United States entered World War I, Sample, to his family’s dismay, signed on for the Naval Reserve, leading directly to a hiatus from Dartmouth. In 1918 and 1919, Sample served in the U.S. Merchant Marine where he earned a third mate’s license and seriously contemplated life as a sailor. Acceding to parental pressure, he returned to Dartmouth, graduating in 1921. Sample’s undergraduate life revolved around sports and a jazz band he formed with his brother, Donald, two years younger and also a Dartmouth student. In November 1933, Sample summarized his life in a letter he wrote introducing himself to Frederick Newlin Price, founder of Ferargil Galleries, who would become his New York art dealer. The artist characterized his undergraduate years as spent “wasting my time intensively.” He told Price that that “I took an art appreciation course and slept thru it every day” (Ferargil Galleries Records, circa 1900–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available on line). In 1920, Donald Sample contracted tuberculosis. He went for treatment to the world-famous Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for the prescribed regimen of rest, healthful food, and fresh air. Visiting his brother in 1921, Paul also contracted the disease. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, and had no certain cure before the development of streptomycin in 1946. Even for patients who appeared to have recovered, there was a significant rate of recurrence. Thus, in his letter to Price, Sample avoided the stigma conjured by naming the disease, but wrote “I had a relapse with a bad lung and spent the next four years hospitalized in Saranac Lake.” The stringent physical restrictions imposed by adherence to “the cure” required Sample to cultivate an alternate set of interests. He read voraciously and, at the suggestion of his physician, contacted the husband of a fellow patient for instruction in art. That artist, then living in Saranac, was Jonas Lie (1880–1940), a prominent Norwegian-American painter and an associate academician at the National Academy of Design. Lie had gained renown for his dramatic 1913 series of paintings documenting the construction of the Panama Canal (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; United States Military Academy, West Point, New York). Primarily a landscape artist, Lie had a particular affinity for scenes with water. His paintings, impressionistic, atmospheric, and brushy, never strayed from a realistic rendering of his subject. Sample regarded Lie as a mentor and retained a lifelong reverence for his teacher. Sample’s early paintings very much reflect Lie’s influence. ` In 1925, “cured,” Sample left Saranac Lake for what proved to be a brief stay in New York City, where his veteran’s benefits financed a commercial art course. The family, however, had moved to California, in the futile hope that the climate would benefit Donald. Sample joined them and after Donald’s death, remained in California, taking classes at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In Sample’s account to Price, “I couldn’t stomach the practice of painting a lot of High Sierras and desert flowers which seemed to be the only kind of pictures that were sold here so I got a job teaching drawing and painting at the art school of the University of Southern California.” Initially hired as a part-time instructor, Sample progressed to full-time status and ultimately, by the mid-1930s, to the post of Chairman of the Fine Art Department. Sample, however, did not want to wind up as a professor. “Teaching is all right in small doses,” he wrote, “but I have a horror of drifting into being a college professor and nothing more.” At the same time as he taught, Sample began to exhibit his work in a variety of venues at first locally, then nationally. Though he confessed himself “a terrible salesman,” and though occupied with continued learning and teaching, Sample was nonetheless, ambitious. In 1927, he wrote in his diary, “I am eventually going to be a painter and a damned good one. And what is more, I am going to make money at it” (as quoted by Glick, p. 15). In 1928, Sample felt sufficiently solvent to marry his long-time love, Sylvia Howland, who had also been a patient at Saranac Lake. The Howland family were rooted New Englanders and in summertime the Samples regularly traveled East for family reunion vacations. While the 1930s brought serious hardship to many artists, for Paul Sample it was a decade of success. Buttressed by the financial safety net of his teacher’s salary, he painted realist depictions of the American scene. While his work addressed depression-era conditions with a sympathetic eye, Sample avoided the anger and tinge of bitterness that characterized much contemporary realist art. Beginning in 1930, Sample began to exhibit regularly in juried exhibitions at important national venues, garnering prizes along the way. In 1930, Inner Harbor won an honorable mention in the Annual Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year Sample was also represented in a show at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and at the Biennial Exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1931, Dairy Ranch won the second Hallgarten Prize at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York. Sample also made his first appearances at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1936, Miner’s Resting won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Always interested in watercolor, in 1936, Sample began to send works on paper to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York. While participating in juried exhibitions, Sample also cultivated commercial possibilities. His first New York art dealer was the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York, which included his work in a November 1931 exhibition. In 1934, Sample joined the Ferargil Galleries in New York, after Fred Price arranged the sale of Sample’s Church Supper to the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1937, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Sample’s Janitor’s Holiday from the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, a notable honor. As prestigious as this exhibition schedule may have been, by far Sample’s most visible presence in the 1930s and 1940s was the result of his relationship with Henry Luce’s burgeoning publishing empire, Time, Inc. Sample’s first contribution to a Luce publication appears to have been another San Pedro...

Allison Gildersleeve addresses the theme of memory, exploring the phenomenon of past and present becoming collapsed or entwined by the emotional experience. Gildersleeve states: “In ...

Valerie B Hird SEA MYTH IV, 2010 oil on gessoed BFK paper 16 x 33 in. 40.6 x 83.8 cm.

In Love is in the Air, Ruiz addresses the politically charged issue of fumigating poppy fields with a deeply human and spiritual tone. This series contrasts the striking beauty of p...

Timothy Rees was fascinated with drawing throughout his youth and after high school pursued a degree in animation. The pull to painting portraits and figures was strong, however, le...

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1965, Ron Hicks was an avid artist from an early age. Hicks began his formal studies in art at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. Hicks contin...

JOAN NELSON UNTITLED, 1984 egg tempera on masonite 24 x 18 in. 61 x 45.7 cm. signed and dated on verso landscape castle

small oil painting on canvas

Signed and dated (at lower left): W. R. Miller 1891; (at lower right): No. 10

Oil painting on linen of chandelier in overgrown forest. nature trees landscape surreal

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and apprenticed in Boston with H. H. Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major, and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39, no. 2 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...

Ruiz's Displacements series poignantly alludes to the tragedy of warfare and forced displacement in Colombia. By juxtaposing serene images of a man transporting his homeland in a can...

Estate stamp (on back, on original stretcher): Estate of/ Edmund Quincy/ 1903-1997 ///

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2018

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1965, Ron Hicks was an avid artist from an early age. Hicks began his formal studies in art at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. Hicks contin...

In lushly-colored paintings, Mark Messersmith creates dense narratives packed with animals, birds, plants, and insects that express his concern for the shrinking world they inhabit. ...

William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, where he studied for several years with local artists, including the leading portraitist there, Abel Buel Moore. In 1850, he moved to ...

Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882

SAPERE AUDE. Dare to be wise. Immanuel Kant’s directive is embodied in the work of David Ligare. For thirty-five years, Ligare has dedicated his work to ...

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2024

Unsigned

"In the world of still life and landscape, conceptual events meet one another – the structural meets the narrative, the small stands in the space of the large, and color has a chance...

Cornelia Foss is renowned for her expressive landscapes, intimate portraits, and still lifes. Born in Berlin in 1931, she spent her early years in Rome before emigrating to the Unite...

This painting is oil on panel. It is not framed. Eleanor Jones Harvey, Chief Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, writes about Bob Stuth-Wade: “Over the course of his career, Bob Stuth-Wade has examined his responses to life through landscape, still life, portraiture, and abstraction. Restlessly creative, he has explored these varied genres with equal concentration…..” Bob Stuth-Wade’s method of painting is uniquely his own, having taught himself technique; his only formal training was as a teenager with Dallas artist Perry...

JULIE HEDRICK RA (Egypt) Sun God, 2021 oil on canvas (diptych) 60 x 120 in. 152.4 x 304.8 cm.

Michael Gregory was born in 1955 in Los Angeles, CA and received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. Previously living and working in Bolinas, California, Gregory h...

David Ligare (b. 1945) Contemporary American Painter "Offering: Grapes & Fig," 2023 Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): Ligare / 2023

John Cobb knew he wanted to be an artist since he was 9. In 1976, he entered Rhode Island School of Design where his realist tendencies were ostracized. Using the money intended for ...

Signed and dated (at lower right): L; (on verso): D. Ligare / 2004

VALERIE HIRD BREAK IN THE HORIZON, 2019 oil, monotypes, gesso, Arches paper, silver leaf, silver amulet 23 1/2 x 22 in. 59.7 x 55.9 cm. mythology

Lauded by critics and collectors alike, the art of Gary Ernest Smith resonates in the mind and memory of contemporary America. Over the past years th...

Mike Carson is a Minneapolis painter, and graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, whose artwork can be found in private and corporate collections throughout the Unite...

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait was born at Livesey Hall, near Liverpool, England, and began his career as a clerk at the gallery of Agnew & Zanetti’s Repository of Arts in Manchester. While...

Signed (on stretcher): Stanley/ Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hard...