Thomas Fransioli

Street Scene: "King George Dies"

1952

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...

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...

In his long and productive career, Clarence Holbrook Carter followed an independent course. He incorporated an unlikely mixture of stylistic influences, drawing from such disparate s...

still life artist Doug newton says, "A still life painting of a branch from a shrub in our garden. The shrub is a Euonymus, a Japanese evergreen variety. At the base of the glass vase are three tomatoes and a Mexican figurine...

Blue is painted in the style of American Realism. The painting is Representational Figurative art which is a time consuming process especially with portraits and figurative art. T...

Aspen Grove in the Rocky Mountains depicts on of Colorado's most popular landscapes in the style of Realist painting. The artist use the natural beauty of Colorado as scenes for his Realist paintings. The artist brings us deep into the painting Forest Bathing. Almost an escape from the world. The artist is a regional landscape painter working in oils and pastels whose subject matter varies from the mountains and desert of west Texas to the wetlands along the Texas coast...

This American realist western landscape, "Above Big Pine", depicts a scene from the majestic Sierra Nevadas in an area above Big Pine in Inyo County from celebrated artist Willard Di...