Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on May 5, 2005 of Fine American Art from 1845 to 1960. Comprised of over seventy paintings as well as a number of bronze sculptures and works on paper, this exhibition and sale features many rare and stellar works by prominent as well as little-known artists. Those represented include John White Alexander, John Leslie Breck, Alfred Thompson Bricher, J. G. Brown, Patrick Henry Bruce, Theodore Earl Butler, Charles Warren Eaton, Frederick Frieseke, Philip Leslie Hale, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Franz Kline, Ernest Lawson, Paul Manship, Alfred Maurer, Thomas Moran, J. Francis Murphy, Lilla Cabot Perry, Joseph Raphael, and John Singer Sargent. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with seventy-four full-page color illustrations and biographies of the artists.

The exhibition demonstrates that the more we know about American art, the more there is to know. Benefited by the wealth of scholarship produced in recent decades, we are now able to discern the context for works in a way that was not previously possible, and thus we can experience each painting or scupture for its fascinating story or background and often for the way that provides new insight. As art from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries becomes increasingly more distant from our time, we prize all the more the truths and understandings of the past that it affords.

Among the compelling mid-nineteenth-century works in the exhibition, Thomas Moran’s Amalfi Coast (ca. 1867-68) is suggestive of an era when the past was viewed through a lens of mystery and romance. Following the example of both the English painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, Moran inserted genre elements into a richly developed landscape, revealing a scene marked by humanity and lore rather than depicting an image merely of a scenic locale. With a sophisticated handling of lighting effects, he created a dramatic atmosphere suited to a place that was the subject of legends—even its name invokes passion, deriving from the mythological nymph called Amalfi that Hercules was thought to have loved.

Moran’s enchantment with the old world was equalled by the allure felt by the German-born painter Herman Herzog for the new one. After moving to Philadelphia in about 1870 to escape the oppression of Prussian rule, Herzog traveled far and wide, creating meticulously detailed landscapes in which he sought to portray the American landscape as a place of rugged, unspoiled beauty. In Buck Hill Falls (ca. 1877), a view of a woodland interior in the Pocono Mountains in which a waterfall cascades over rocks, he invokes an outsider’s veneration for the romantic vision of America as a new Eden, expressed earlier by the Hudson River School.

In the 1890s images of elegant women at rest or engaged in quiet activities flooded American exhibitions. Yet this subject was often a pretext for artists to explore a variety of thematic issues. This was the case for John White Alexander, whose emphasis was usually not on his sitters themselves, but rather on the flowing lines, rich fabrics, and coloristic harmonies of their gowns. As demonstrated in The Green Dress, in which the subject’s head is bowed and shadowed, this focus enabled him to explore the nature of elegance itself in the refined and sedate sense that as it was defined during his era. Philip Leslie Hale likewise utilized the figure in his paintings of the “yellow girls” that he painted in Matunuck, Rhode Island, during the summer of 1895 in which he sought to merge the spontaneity of Impressionism with a decorative and analytical approach to form. His method, in which a complex color weave comprised of an intricate network of small, directional brushstrokes merge and mingle when seen from a distance, is astonishingly close to that of the contemporaneous images of Italian Divisionists such as Giovanni Segantini. Yet, for American audiences, Hale’s style seemed a form of ultra-Impressionism that was too extreme. Perhaps in response to criticism, Hale abandoned his experimental mode for a more conventional one in the period that followed, leaving only a few examples of this unique aesthetic convergence.

John Singer Sargent also often painted women, capturing their distinctive personalities with psychological astuteness. At the same time, he used his subjects as opportunities for revealing his dashing stylistic flair. His approach is exemplified in his Portrait of Edith French (ca. 1901), which he rendered in two hours. His technique in the creating of this work was recorded by the American art student Julie Heyneman, who was awestruck as she watched him paint with a concentrated energy, suggesting his subject’s features and her atmospheric setting with a great economy of means. The painting is the only known example in Sargent’s oeuvre in which both an exact eyewitness account of Sargent’s creative process and the specific painting that resulted have survived.

In the early twentieth century many American artists continued to use stylistic modes that had originated earlier. By contrast, Patrick Henry Bruce was among those who was quick to embrace the modernist approaches that had sprung forth in Paris. There, through attending the salons of Gertrude Stein, Bruce befriended Henri Matisse and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the founders of Orphic Cubism. Adopting an original style influenced by Cubism and Fauvism, Bruce used his subjects as a means of formal exploration, as is demonstrated in his austere and yet glowing Still Life with Plate (ca. 1912). By contrast, the Art Deco sculptor Paul Manship created works reflecting the sustaining force of the classical tradition. In Flight of Europa (1925), he not only relied on antique sources for his subject matter, but also created a symmetrcially composed, carefully balanced design in which smooth, flowing surfaces are modeled in the tradition of Greek sculpture. Yet, his stylized treatment reveals the referential nature of his approach, underscoring its contemporary nature.

As exemplified in the works included in Fine American Art from 1845 to 1960, the works created by American artists of a previous era only stand to gain more of our interest and engage our sense of wonder as time passes.