BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

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...

A master of form, influenced by French and English patrons, Carleton Wiggins became famous for painting pastoral scenes of New England By Alexandra A. Jopp John Carleton Wiggins (more commonly known as just Carleton Wiggins) was born to Guy and Adelaide Ludlum Wiggins on March 4, 1848, in Turners (now Harriman), N। Y., west of the Hudson River. Wiggins received his early education in Middletown N.Y., and later attended public schools in Brooklyn. As a youth, he took a job at an insurance company on Wall Street, but he worked there for only two years before realizing that he had neither the courage nor the talent to devote himself to the business world. Instead, he began to study art under Johann Carmiencke, a romantic landscape painter of the Hudson River School. Under Carmiencke, Carleton turned his attention primarily to the study of landscapes. After dedicating some time to drawing at the National Academy, Wiggins followed the guidance and encouragement of his patron, Jos...

Pennsylvania Landscape. Painter of Pennsylvania landscapes and marine subjects of New Jersey By Alexandra A Jopp Influenced early in his career by the Hudson River School and Luminist preferences, Frederick DeBourg Richards specialized in landscape and maritime scene. By the middle of the 19th century, he ranked among the most accomplished artists practicing realism in the United States. Over time, his brushwork became somewhat more painterly, however he never abandoned his dedication to meticulously accurate observation. Frederick DeBourg Richards was born on June 24, 1822, in Wilmington, Del. He lived in New York in the 1840s before moving to Philadelphia in 1848, where he spent most of his remaining years with his wife and two daughters. Richards considered himself mostly self-taught as a painter, and he achieved success as a landscape artist by exhibiting his paintings at the American Art-Union, an exclusive association in New York City where the finest American ...