NEW YORK.- Doyle will hold an auction of American Paintings, Furniture and Decorative Arts on Wednesday, May 5 at 10am. Featured will be 19th and 20th centuries, including fine examples of portraiture; Hudson River, Western and regional landscapes; marine paintings and still lifes. The sale also showcases fine American furniture and decorative arts, including silver, ceramics, mirrors, folk art, samplers and rugs.
One of America’s great Realist painters, Edward Hopper studied under Ash Can School great Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. The exquisite charcoal drawing on paper, Cherry Tree, was owned by the Reverend and Mrs. Arthayer R. Sanborn, who resided in Hopper’s birthplace of Nyack, New York (est. $60,000-90,000).
Carl Clemens Moritz Rungius’ A Cowboy’s Mount is a prime example of the artist’s anatomically accurate depictions of wildlife in the American West. Rungius’ highly romanticized works show robust wildlife undisturbed in nature, now a part of the American visual vocabulary. In A Cowboy's Mount we see Rungius’s excellent draftsmanship and his superb use of color, effortlessly deployed to depict a casual view of a horse set against a background of cool greens (est. $20,000-40,000).
German immigrant Edmund Henry Osthaus was principal of the Toledo Academy of Fine Arts before leaving to pursue his twin passions: painting and training sporting dogs. A founder of the National Field Trial Association, Osthaus painted portraits of the first thirty years of trial-winning dogs. A sublime work on canvas, Hunter with Spaniels is a sublime example of Osthaus’ deft rendering of sporting dogs (est. $25,000-35,000).
Creating over 6,000 portraits of sail and steam vessels, Antonio Jacobsen is one of the most revered American maritime artists. Painted in 1899, the Camanche was, for a period following the Civil War, the Navy's only ironclad warship stationed on the Pacific coast (est. $10,000-15,000).
Joseph Henry Sharp (American, 1859-1953) is known for his sympathetic views of Native Americans from the Great Plains and further West. Born in Bridgeport Ohio, he studied in Munich and Paris. He traveled throughout the American West and ended up settling in Taos Pueblo. In 1915, he and a number of other artists including Eanger Irving Couse who is also represented in the sale formed the Taos Society of Artist. Sharp's intimate view near the artist’s studio makes it easy to understand why these painters would be attracted to the area with its expanding vistas and abundant flora (est. $10,000-15,000).
Frank Henry Shapleigh was born in Boston in 1842. He took his first artistic training at the Lowell Institute of Drawing, which offered free instruction. He continued his training in Paris, where he studied under the Barbazon painter Emile Laminet. It may have been Laminet who introduced Shapleigh to the genre of barnyard and rural scene painting, which would make up a large part of his oeuvre. The Old Grist Mill, Limington, Maine, is painted with a directness and candor that reflect Shapleigh’s method of working en plein air. As in many of the artist’s evocations of American country life, the overall effect of the painting is one of calm and perhaps nostalgic longing (est. $6,000-9,000).
