Karen Woods

On the Way 1

2023

The primary subjects of my paintings are 21st century man's working monuments, which represent our culture's dedication to production and consumption. The essence of our way of life ...

When I think about the conventions of painting -- a tradition I respect immensely -- I notice that my concern has always been with the interplay of light and structure" says artist S...

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from the front seat of a car lo...

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from the front seat of a car lo...

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 ...

Thomas Fransioli, born in 1906 in Seattle, Washington, trained as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as an architect before his service in World War II. Largel...

It was Henry Cross's portraits of horses belonging to the prominent breeders and trainers of the second half of the nineteenth century that won the artist renown as an animal painter. Born and raised in upstate New York, Cross's proficiency in both drafting and caricature was revealed while he was still a student at the Binghamton Academy, New York. In 1852, when he was only fifteen years old, Cross joined a traveling circus that took him to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and to the first of many Indian encampments that he would draw upon for subject matter throughout his career. Biographers differ as to the year Cross left for Europe, however, he was in Paris from 1852 to 1853 or 1854, where he studied with Rosa Bonheur, a highly esteemed French painter of horses. Upon Cross's return to the United States he was commissioned to paint the studs of wealthy horsemen, including those of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Robert Bonner, the owner-publisher of The New York Ledger, and "Copper King" Marcus Daly, whose 18,000 acre stock farm was reputed to be the greatest and most valuable horse ranch in the world. Although Cross received the highest pay of any equine artist of his day (up to $35,000. for one order, according to The Horse Review of April 10, 1918, p. 328), he frequently joined traveling circuses and painted the locales where they visited. He also painted portraits of notable contemporaries, such as President Abraham Lincoln, ex-president Ulysses S. Grant, King Edward VII of England, W. F. "Buffalo Bill...

Joshua Shaw was a farmer’s son, born in Billingborough, Lincolnshire, and orphaned at the age of seven. After a boyhood of privation, he tried a number of occupations, until he finally apprenticed to a sign painter and found his métier. Shaw went to Manchester to study art, and by 1802 was in Bath, painting landscapes. In that year he began to exhibit his work at the Royal Academy in London. Essentially self-taught, Shaw achieved an impressive level of competence and versatility, producing portraits, floral compositions, still lifes, landscapes, and, cattle pieces. Shaw continued to send works for exhibition at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery, all in London, until 1841. (Although Shaw is regularly mentioned and frequently illustrated in a host of general books on American art history, as well as included in numerous historical survey exhibitions, the only monographic study of this artist is Miriam Carroll Woods, “Joshua Shaw [1776–1860]: A Study of the Artist and his Paintings” [M.A. thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1971]. Apart from short biographical sketches in various dictionaries and museum collection catalogues, the two most interesting references, both contemporary, are John Sartain’s personal recollections in The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 1808–1897 [1899; reprint 1969] and an article in Scientific American from August 7, 1869, “Joshua Shaw, Artist and Inventor.” The article quotes extensively from an autobiographical document in the possession of Shaw’s grandson that Shaw prepared for William Dunlap...