Manhattan - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Jennifer Losch Bartlett Ocean piece: Untitled painting studies, 1975 Ink and pastel, mixed media on graph paper Boldly signed and dated "Summer 75" by Jennifer Bartlett on the lower right front Frame included: held in a museum quality wood frame with UV plexiglass Ink and pastel on graph paper drawing. Boldly signed and dated "Summer 75" by Jennifer Bartlett on the lower right front. Some of the artist's annotations on the drawings say: Ocean piece Sky Water Beach Sometimes looking from water maybe see mountain two people on beach lying down sometimes they face each other ... bwhitefree hand drawing from water beach w/ towel sky sand water on a diagonal on a curve sky water sand...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

Margot Glass's graphite drawing on black heavyweight paper transforms delicate dandelions into luminous, ghost-like forms. Each fine line is meticulously drawn, creating a richly det...

"Good Health Week" WPA American Scene Mid 20th Century Modern Social Realism Jo Cain (1904 – 2003) Good Health Week 10 ½ x 15 1/2 inches Oil on pape...

Norman Barr recorded his beloved New York City from the Bronx, to Coney Island, to the Fulton Fish Market. In this period he was on the New Deal's Mural ...

By developing a geometry between line and the spaces in between in their work, the abstract paintings of Tayo Heuser create a point of departure for the mind into a spiritual consci...

Margot Glass's graphite drawing on prepared black paper transforms delicate dandelions into luminous, ghost-like forms. Each fine line is meticulously drawn, creating a richly detail...

Paul Gattuso attended the Art Students League and worked primarily in New York City. There is an old address with a Bronx, Grand Concourse address. Gattus...

Norman Barr recorded his beloved New York City from the Bronx, to Coney Island, to the Fulton Fish Market. In this period he was on the New Deal's Mural ...

At the center of this large-scale black and white charcoal and pastel painting, a diver launches himself from untold heights, frozen at the peak of action against an ecstatic plume of clouds. Zalopany excels at painting with light, often abstracting areas of a composition with explosions of brush strokes and impossibly smooth blending. The cloud mass at the center of Diver is at once a liquid pool and O’Keefe’s Jimson Weed...

Answering the Door Early 20th Century w/c Fauvism Social Realism American Scene Note: We have three similar in style works from 1911 available now on 1stDibs. All are framed identi...

Paul Gattuso attended the Art Students League and worked primarily in New York City. There is an old address with a Bronx, Grand Concourse address. Gattus...

This black and white charcoal and pastel painting features a Burmese temple landscape. Rising from clouds of gnarled trees, the temple’s triangular shape thins to a pointed dome, wit...

An idyllic scene at New York City's favorite beach, Coney Island. Before the year was over Barr was in the Army. It is ink and litho-crayon. Barr liked that medium because it didn't ...

833 CLE Series: Red Bridge w/Car. Contemporary artist Thomas Roese, inspired by the industrial landscape of steel mills, rail yards, architectural details, and the urban neighborhoo...

Signed in pencil. Blanche Grambs, whose career started with the WPA, later developed a career in illustration. Her botanical illustrations are especiall...

Two Men on a Street Early 20th Century w/c Fauvism Social Realism American Scene Note: We have three similar in style works from 1911 available now on 1stDibs. All are framed identi...

Gordon Hope Grant (1875-1962) created the watercolor entitled “The Lumber Wharf” in circa 1947. It is signed in the lower left 1 inch above the paper edge. The watercolor paper size ...

AMERICA'S CUP - 1967. WING MARK. INTREPID - DAME PATTIE [AUS]. This Joseph Webster Golinkin watercolor of the 1967 America's Cup depicts the...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

Mary Reilly's "Cherry Blossoms 4" (2025) is a 24 x 18-inch graphite pencil drawing that captures the delicate beauty of cherry blossoms. Reilly's meticulous technique involves layeri...

Alexander P. Thomson, R.S.W. (Scottish, 1887-1962) Plockton (Ross-shire, Scotland), 20th century Watercolor on paper 15 x 22 in. Framed: 25 1/16 x 32 in. Signed lower left: A.P. Thom...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

"Under and Behind" Contemporary artist Thomas Roese, inspired by the industrial landscape of steel mills, rail yards, architectural details, and urban neighborhoods surrounding him,...

This graphite drawing by Mary Reilly captures the delicate beauty of blossoms she encountered on a walk in Vermont. Reilly, known for her mastery of graphite pencil, transforms ordin...

Mainau, 19th Century Watercolor on paper 7 1/4 x 5 1/8 in. Mat: 11 x 8 3/4 in. Inscribed lower left: Mainau IV.12 Inscription verso Mainau is an island in Lake Constance (on the Sou...

Two Navajo Colored Pencil drawings by Lois Rogers, New Mexico. Sight size: 3 x 4 2/3 in. Framed: 5 3/4 x 7 1/8 in. Both signed lower right, and inscribed verso: colored pencil, Lo...

Gouache on paper This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at University of California, Berkeley. After...

Untitled (Coastal New York) Pastel on paper 17 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. Framed: 24 1/2 x 30 in. Signed lower right

Study of Trees in Forest II Conté crayon on paper 8.5 x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm) This work is offered by ClampArt in New York City.

This is the only drawing Mary Reilly has ever done of Maui - a gorgeous scene with breaking, frothy water captured in graphite pencil.

702 CLE Series: Three Rows in the Yard. Contemporary artist Thomas Roese, inspired by the industrial landscape of steel mills, rail yards, architectural details, and the urban neigh...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

Gouache on paper Signed and dated in pencil, l.r. This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at Universi...

Gouache on paper This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at University of California, Berkeley. After...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

Gouache on paper Signed and dated, l.r. 9 x 12 inches This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at Univ...

"Feel the Beat" is a dynamic artwork features three figures caught in a moment of rhythmic movement, exuding an ethereal energy. Each figure is rendered in a monochromatic palette, e...

"Bathers" American Scene Social Realism 20th Century Modernism Ashcan Fauvism Charles Demuth (1883-1935) "Bathers" 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches watercolor on paper, c. 1930 Signed lower le...

Drawing in ink and watercolor of a private yacht. Signed by the artist on the front. Jean Hannon grew up in Boston and attended the School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and L’E...

Sandy Litchfield brings her magical abstracted landscapes to a new medium in her recent colored pencil drawings. Loose, delicate lines scramble over one another, bringing a diffuse, ...

Sandy Litchfield found peace and inspiration in regular solitary walks through nature throughout the pandemic. Her most recent body of work diaristically documents her constitutional...

Gouache on paper Signed and dated, l.l. This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at University of Cali...

George Tzannes's Trees in the Mist is a 4 x 10 inches black and white monotype representing a Greek landscape. Olive and cypress trees populate the landscape. Tzannes is an American ...

Olive trees and olive groves are often the main subject of Tzannes paintings. An American painter of Greek origins, Tzannes visited the Greek island of K...

The location of this early oil pastel drawing was identified by other pieces from the same drawing book. The oil pastel was a new invention - just on the market in 1921 and it appea...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

This exquisite graphite drawing by Mary Reilly captures the delicate beauty of cherry blossoms with striking realism and atmospheric depth. Known for her masterful pencil work, Reill...

Sandy Litchfield finds the consummate marriage of medium and subject in her latest enchanted landscapes. She narrows her focus to lake scenes, creating an almost palindrome-like comp...

Sandy Litchfield brings her magical abstracted landscapes to a new medium in her recent colored pencil drawings. Loose, delicate lines scramble over one another, bringing a diffuse, ...

This drawing reveals the artist's mastery of the medium and her connection to her subjects. In this one, we peek at a soft horizon line as we gaze though a patch of wildflowers near ...

This drawing reveals the artist's mastery of the medium and her connection to her subjects. In this one, we peek beach-strewn seashells from her travels to Sanibel Island boast bubbl...

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999) created [untitled] “STREET SCENE WITH FRUIT VENDOR” in circa 1950. This unsigned watercolor and came to us directly from the Sanchez estate. It is stamped on the verso "Estate of Emilio Sanchez." This piece is in good to very good condition and painted to the paper's edge. The paper size is 14.88 x 15.25 inches (37.6 x 38.6 cm). “Best known for his architectural paintings and lithographs, Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999) explored the effects of light and shadow to emphasize the abstract geometry of his subjects. His artwork encompasses his Cuban heritage...

Kathleen Beausoleil lives and works in Fair Haven, NJ. Primarily working in oil paint, her works focus on what it means to be a social being. Beausoleil received a 2022 Fellowship fr...

Charles Buckley sources images from the fifties and using acrylic ink, carefully renders familiar scenes of the everyday with lines of varying thicknesses. The subjects run the gamut...

Sandy Litchfield brings her magical abstracted landscapes to a new medium in her recent colored pencil drawings. Loose, delicate lines scramble over one another, bringing a diffuse, ...

AMERICA'S CUP - 1967. BEAT TO THE FINISH - INTREPID (USA) VS. DAME PATTIE (AUS). “Beat to the Finish” is a 1967 watercolor by Joseph Webster ...

Mary Reilly’s laborious method of toning her paper serves as the starting point for her intricate compositions. She begins by covering the entire sheet with up to eight smooth, unmod...

Margot Glass focuses primarily on drawing, using traditional techniques and materials as the foundation for her work -- including silverpoint and 14k goldpoint, homemade organic inks...