BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

                               Edmund C. Tarbell By Alexandra A. Jopp Edmund Tarbell was renowned for his elegant, pearly interiors as well as vivacious outdoor paintings of his family. Mother and Mary , 1922 Edmund Tarbell was an American painter who won numerous prizes and medals and experimented with a range of forms of plein air painting . An extraordinary talent with the brush, he was inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch traditions and was especially fond of Vermeer. His environment was his own, and his wife and four children served as his models. He specialized in delicately finished, pearly interiors, and he devoted a significant part of his career to capturing images of young women pursuing domestic activities such as sewing or reading in elegantly decorated domestic rooms filled with antiquarian or oriental objects...

Resident of Chelsea, England, Alfred Egerton Cooper, was best known for portraits of King George VI and Winston Churchill, as well as for landscapes, coastal, harbor and horse racing scenes By Alexandra A. Jopp Alfred Egerton Cooper was an internationally acclaimed portraitist who also painted landscapes, coastal and harbor views of Great Britain and horse racing scenes. His style emphasized deep realism, and his glittering career hinged on the glamour he imparted to European royalty, Buckingham Palace , the British Parliament and rich and powerful public figures. Ambitious and technically skilled, he fulfilled countless royal commissions and had some of the most powerful and notable people in Britain sit for portraits. Alfred Egerton Cooper was born in 1883 in Tettenhall, Staffordshire , United Kingdom . Showing early artistic leanings, he studied at Bilston School of Art and on a scholarship at London ’s Royal College of Art, from which he gr...

Red House, Autumn. Carl William Peters is best known as a poet-painter of winter landscapes that he composed directly from the fields. By Alexandra A Jopp Carl William Peters, “one of the best kept secrets in the history of twentieth century American art,” was born to Frederick and Louisa Peters in a Rochester, N.Y., community of working-class German immigrants on Nov. 14, 1897.1 Peters studied anatomy, perspective and illustration at Rochester’s Mechanics Institute of Technology while working for a sign painter and serving as an apprentice to a theatre scene design company. He then went to the famed Art Students League in New York where he learned landscape painting. Peters concentrated on reproducing the ordinary places of America early in his career. He painted winter scenes and produced landscapes of his beloved Genesee Land with a rare “spirit of place” that drew critical acclaim during a long and prolific career that lasted until his death at 82. Peters could be compar...

--> Flowers, Italy, 1931, Phoenix Art Museum.   An Italian-born member of the American avant-garde, Joseph Stella became famous for radiant, Futurist-influenced paintings of New York and particularly the Brooklyn Bridge By Alexandra A. Jopp --> Joseph Stella is an elusive figure in the history of American art. His unpredictable, almost capricious nature was shaped by idiosyncratic cultures of East and West. His art is like his personality––contradictory, intense, and ambiguous. It is an immense kaleidoscope, with everything in it fantastic, hyperbolic, joyful. He was consumed by turbulent enthusiasm and joyous visions, but he was saddened by everyday routine, and he searched all his life for “peace, serenity, and transcendence of the mundane, the superficial and the ephemeral.”1 Taking a particular interest in Futurism, he developed a remarkable skill for drawing, and his work contrasted sharply with the style of his contemporaries. The in...

John Henry Twachtman was born in Cincinnati and was exposed first to the esthetic principles pf Munich and later of Paris when Whistler and Japanese prints were the rage. He dedicated himself exclusively to landscape painting. He slowly built up images that seem to accept impressionism but more likely imply that he sought the true spirit of nature. Reflecting a true individualism in painting, John Henry Twachtman’s style formed the core of a new American Impressionism. By Alexandra A Jopp John Henry Twachtman, a member of the successful exhibiting group known as the “Ten American Painters,” was best known for his impressionist seasonal landscapes. His style varied widely throughout his career, to the point that essayist M. Therese Southgate described him as “a man of many moods” who “especially liked the mysterious in nature: the full moon, clouds, fog, snow, the country, isolation.”1 John Henry Twachtman. Arques–la–Bataille , 1885. John Henry Twachtman. Winter Landsca...

Giverny, 1887 Willard Metcalf, a founding member of the “Ten American Painters,” worked in an Impressionist style tempered by atmospheric poetry                               By Alexandra A Jopp Willard Metcalf, a contemporary of Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, and John Twachtman, was a well-regarded Impressionist painterartist, teacher and illustrator who became known as a classic painter of the landscapes of his native New England. One of the “Ten American Painters” (also known as “The Ten”), a group whose members resigned from the Society of American Artists to form their own (small) association, Metcalf influenced many painters while teaching at Cooper Union and the Art Students League in New York. He achieved great fame in his lifetime, winning a Webb Prize in 1896 for his painting Gloucester Harbor (1895), being elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and ha...

Above the Clouds at Sunrise, 1849.        American painter, landscape specialist and leading figure of the Hudson River School By Alexandra A Jopp Frederic Edwin Church was among the most celebrated artists of the late 1850s and 1860s. As Thomas Cole’s most successful pupil, Church worked as a young man within the milieu of the Hudson River School. He was described by historian Gwendolyn Owens as “a master of the panoramic landscape,”1 and by the 1850s, according to writer Joe Sherman, he “had become a painter to watch, one who critics claimed had a ‘true feeling for art’ and who was heading toward an ‘original path.’”2 Church’s harmonies of color, light and luminosity helped to turn historical landscape into a popular art form. Hooker’s Party Coming to Hartford, 1846. Falls of the Tequendama near Bogotá, New Granada (1864) Church was born into a wealthy and prominent Connecticut family on May 4, 1826. He showed early artistic talent and, as...