20th Century Landscape Paintings

Sunflowers, Countryside, River, Yellow, Sky, Clouds, Ukraine Georgij MOROZ (Dneprodzerzinsk, Ukraine, 1937 - St. Petersburg, 2015) MUSEUMS Moscow, Tret’jakov Gallery Moscow, USSR Ar...

Seascape Moonlight with Crashing Waves Vintage British Oil Painting Art measures 20 x 16 inches Frame measures 24 x 20 inches This painting depicts a serene and dramatic coastal sc...

Ronnie Landfield (1947- American) "Untitled" 1982 Acrylic on Paper Dimensions: Sheet 30" X 42" Frame 32 X 44 Hand signed and dated lower right Provenance: Denman Associates, Seattle gallery Ronnie Landfield (American, 1947-) is an abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction (related to Postminimalism, Color Field painting, and Abstract expressionism), and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery. Landfield is best known for his abstract landscape paintings, and has held more than seventy solo exhibitions and more than two hundred group exhibitions. Born and raised in Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, Landfield first exhibited his paintings in Manhattan in 1962. He continued his study of painting by visiting major museum and gallery exhibitions in New York during the early sixties and by taking painting and drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York and in Woodstock, New York. He graduated from the High School of Art and Design in June 1963. He briefly attending the Kansas City Art Institute before returning to New York in November 1963. At sixteen Landfield rented his first loft at 6 Bleecker Street near The Bowery (sublet with a friend from the figurative painter Leland Bell), during a period when his abstract expressionist oil paintings took on hard-edged and large painterly shapes. In February 1964, Landfield traveled to Los Angeles; and in March he began living in Berkeley where he began painting Hard-edge abstractions primarily painted with acrylic. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute before returning to New York in July 1965. From 1964 to 1966 he experimented with minimal art, sculpture, hard-edge geometric painting, found objects, and finally began a series of 15 - 9' x 6' mystical "border paintings". After a serious setback in February 1966 when his loft at 496 Broadway burned down, he returned to painting in April 1966 by sharing a loft with his friend Dan Christensen at 4 Great Jones Street. The Border Painting series was completed in July 1966, and soon after architect Philip Johnson acquired Tan Painting for the permanent collection of The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. In late 1966 through 1968 he began exhibiting his paintings and works on paper in leading galleries and museums. Landfield moved into his loft at 94 Bowery in July 1967; there, he continued to experiment with rollers, staining, hard-edge borders, and painted unstretched canvases on the floor for the first time. Briefly in 1967-1968 he worked part-time for Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press. Landfield was part of a large circle of young artists who had come to Manhattan during the 1960s. Peter Young, Dan Christensen, Peter Reginato, Eva Hesse, Carlos Villa, William Pettet, David R. Prentice, Kenneth Showell, David Novros, Joan Jonas, Michael Steiner, Frosty Myers, Tex Wray, Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Robert Povlich, Neil Williams, Carl Gliko, Billy Hoffman, Lee Lozano, Pat Lipsky, John Griefen, Brice Marden, James Monte, John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Noland, Clement Greenberg, Bob Neuwirth, Joseph Kosuth, Mark di Suvero, Brigid Berlin, Lawrence Weiner, Rosemarie Castoro, Marjorie Strider, Dorothea Rockburne, Leo Valledor, Peter Forakis...

James Robinson (1944-2015) Austin, Dallas, Houston Artist Image Size: 24 x 36 Frame Size: 32 x 44 Medium: Acrylic on Canvas "Last Light" Biography James Robinson (1944-2015) Biograph...

Alexander John Drysdale (1870-1934) New Orleans Louisiana / New York Artist Size: 20 x 30 Frame: 26 x 36 Medium: Oil Wash? Watercolor? Dated: 1917 "Misty Bayou" Housed in the original magnificent frame. Alexander John Drysdale (1870-1934) New Orleans Louisiana / New York Artist Alexander John (A.J.) Drysdale was an early 20th century Louisiana artist who specialized in landscapes using the technique of oil wash, that gave his works a characteristic of a hazy look. Drysdale made use of this technique by diluting the oil paint with kerosene and applying it with cotton balls. Alexander John Drysdale, born in Marietta, Georgia on March 2, 1870, came to New Orleans at the age of fifteen with his parents. His father, Reverend Alexander J. Drysdale, became the rector of Christ Church Cathedral. Alex received private tutoring from a Professor Mehado and art lessons from Ida Hackell at the Southern Art Union. Later in New Orleans (1887) he studied art under Paul Poincy (1833-1909). The exact date of Drysdale's arrival in New York is unknown, but he enrolled in the Art Students League where he received instruction from Charles C. Curran and Frank Vincent DuMond. Apparently, he remained in New York for about five years and did not go to Europe for further study. After some time, Drysdale began specializing in landscapes, executed in a tonalist manner. Back in New Orleans, Drysdale was inspired by local subjects, especially swamp or bayou areas and other desolate wetlands. Over a period of many years Drysdale's landscapes evolved to a unique stylistic maturity. In 1909 he received a gold medal from the New Orleans Art Association. It is easy to see the influence of two artists that he admired: Corot and Inness. Working equally well in oil and watercolor (he also did scenes in charcoal), Drysdale usually divided his scene into halves or thirds, typically, a foreground consisting of tall swamp grasses achieved with broad vertical strokes; a middle ground consisting of a backdrop row of trees at the horizon line executed with staccato, jabbing strokes resulting in textural contrast; and a background devoted totally to a tonalist-like moisture-laden sky often hazy with no clouds or only a slight indication of them. This formulaic compositional format rendered with an economy of technique resulted in imagery with repetitious forms and shapes diffused in a nebulous space. In this regard, Drysdale's works are impressionistic; he also tended to use the violets and blues of the impressionist palette. Yet he lacked a specific interest in color and light. Although his expression of the Louisiana scenery is very personal, even mystical, the artist appears to have been very limited in subject matter. One of his last works was a mural for the Shushan (New York) Airport administration building, and shortly before his death he was employed as an artist by the Civil Works Administration. Drysdale was a member of the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans, and his work was in the permanent collection of the Delgado Museum for many years. The artist worked at his studio at 320 Exchange Place in the picturesque Vieux Carré until his death at the age of sixty-three. Stewart (in Painting in the South, 1983), describes how Drysdale was a shrewd businessman. He would solicit new homeowners who might need a canvas to decorate a wall, or a cotton broker who recently made the headlines. Drysdale died in New Orleans, on February 9, 1934. Sources: Louisiana Artists from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. James W. Nelson. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1968; Wiesendanger, Martin and Margaret Wiesendanger, Nineteenth Century Louisiana Painters and Paintings from the Collection of W. E. Groves. New Orleans: W. E. Groves Gallery, 1971, pp. 44-45; Painting in the South: 1584-1980, Exh. cat. Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum, 1983, pp. 106-107, 114, 276; Chambers, Bruce W., Art and Artists of the South: The Robert P. Coggins Collection of American Paintings. Exh. cat. Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1984, p. 88; Zellman, Michael David, 300 Years of American Art. Seacacus, NJ: Wellfleet Press, 1987, p. 634; Gerdts, William H., Art across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710-1920. New York: Abbeville Press, 1990, vol. 2, pp. 110-111. Submitted by Richard H. Love and Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D. Biography from The Johnson Collection ALEXANDER JOHN DRYSDALE (1870–1934) Born in Marietta, Georgia, Alexander John Drysdale was the only son of an ordained Episcopal priest whose ministry required frequent moves to parishes in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. In 1883, he accepted the call to become dean of Christ Church Cathedral, New Orleans, and was later elected a bishop. Alexander, thirteen years old when the family settled in New Orleans, began his art studies under the instruction of Ida C. Haskell, a California-born artist who was on the faculty of the recently established Southern Art Union. The local academy had been founded by several leading artists, including Andres Molinary, William Henry Buck...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 30 x 40 Frame Size: 39 x 49 Medium: Oil on Canvas Dated 1957 "Bluebonnet Creek" Texas Hill Country Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910, near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 25 x 30 Frame Size: 34 x 39 Medium: Oil on Canvas Circa 1950 "Lazy Day Blues" Texas Bluebonnet Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas is in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910, near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit, and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions...

Paul Emile PISSARRO (1884-1972) Calvados : River in the forest Original oil on panel Handsigned on bottom On panel 46 x 55 cm (c. 18 x 22 in) In a golden wood frame size 60 x 67 cm ...

G. Harvey (Gerald Harvey Jones) (1933-2017) San Antonio, Austin, and Fredericksburg Artist Image Size: 24 x 36 Frame Size: 32 x 44 Medium: Oil on Canvas Dated 1996 "Powder Snow Morni...

This artwork Titled "Les Quais de la Seine with Notre Dame, Paris" c.1970 is an oil painting on canvas by noted French artist Guy Buffet, 1943-2023. It is signed at the lower right c...

Genre: Post Impressionist Subject: Landscape Medium: Oil Surface: Canvas Country: France Dimensions: 13" x 16" Jacques Zucker was born in 1900 in Radom, Poland. He was a notably fa...

Paul Emile PISSARRO (1884-1972) Normandy : Trail near Saint Omer, c. 1940 Original oil on canvas Handsigned on the bottom left corner Signed and titled on the back On canvas 46 x 61...

Jean Vollet Lac st Cassien Painting Framed Size 30 x 23 Inches Image Size 14.25 x 21 Inches Jean Vollet was born at Montayral, France on June 29, 1935. Studied art at the Ecole d'A...

Russian Abstract Expressionist Village Oil Painting Soviet Non Conformist Frame: 27.5 X 27.5 Image: 19.5 X 19.5 Artist: Myhaylo Shteinberg (aka Mykhaylo Shteinberg, Michael Steinbe...

This beautiful early 20th-century oil painting by French artist Eugène Galien-Laloue (1854-1941) depicts several figures unloading fish at the port of Dieppe. Eugène Galien-Laloue i...

Gorgeous realistic Big Sur in Northern California seascape during sunset by Alexander Dzirgurski (American, 1911-1995), circa 1970. Signed lower right corner, artist stamp on verso....

Original Painting tigers in jungle by river with reflection, tropical jungle setting. Titled "Paper Boat". Hand signed recto and titled verso. Framed 25.5 X 21.5 Canvas is 24 X 20...

G. Harvey (Gerald Harvey Jones) (1933-2017) San Antonio, Austin, and Fredericksburg Artist Image Size: 20 x 24 Frame: 30 x 34 Medium: Oil On Canvas "Gathering Strays" Hereford Cattle...

Robert Harrison (Born 1949) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 30 x 40 Frame Size: 40 X 50 Medium: Oil on Canvas "Coreopsis and Cacti" Texas Hill Country Biography Robert Harrison (Born ...

A painting of Versailles by important Post-Impressionist painter Henri Le Sidaner, titled "Le Pavillion de Musique sous la neige (a Versailles Trianon)". Painting accompanied with a...

A painting of Versailles by important Post-Impressionist painter Henri Le Sidaner, titled "Statue, Sans Tête, Versailles". Painting includes certificate signed by Yann Farinaux-LeSi...

Emilio Grau Sala (1911-1975) - La Rochelle - Mixed media Artwork 49x65 cm. Frame measures 69x85 cm. Son of cartoonist Juan Grau Miró, he was born in Barcelona in 1911. Although he a...

Robert Harrison (Born 1949) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 36 x 48 Frame Size: 44 x 56 Medium: Oil on canvas Dated 1999 "Coreopsis & Daggers" Texas Hill Country. Wildflowers Biograph...

Kent R Wallis (1945-Active) "A Wooded Lane" Oil Paint on Canvas Unframed 24" x 36 Framed: 25" x 37"

Marion Maas (American, b. 1930) Untitled, c. 1980s Oil on canvas 21 7/8 x 27 1/2 in. Framed: 23 1/2 x 29 1/4 x 1 in. Signed lower right Landscape, figurat...

Childe Hassam paints a beautiful view out onto the ocean from between the trees in his artwork entitled, “Marine View, Isle of Shoals.”

Very finely painted winter impressionist landscape by Allen Dean Cochran (1888 - 1971). Oil on canvas. Housed in a spectacular, period, gold giltwood frame. Signed.

Seagulls in the snow. 1994. Canvas, oil, 70x112 cm

Richard Hayley Lever (1876-1958) was born in Australia and studied art in both Paris and London. His art hangs in many museums worldwide. While living in New York, he painted many m...

Very impressive early abstract painting by Peter Busa (1914 - 1985). Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. Housed in a period modernist frame.

“Hoeing Cotton” is an oil on tin painting by Thomas Hart Benton, painted in 1932. The painting size is 9 1/8 x 13 inches. The framed size is 15 1/4 x 19 x 1 3/4 inches. The work is s...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 12 x 16 Frame Size: 21 x 25 Medium: Oil Dated 1958 "Prickly Pear Path" Texas Hill Country Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work, however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique atmosphere. In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford (1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork, restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's store on Guadalupe Street. During the early years of World War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas. However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child, Christina Maria Salinas. Like most landscape artists of the era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the "Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for Mexican-American collectors. By the late 1940s, the American economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas. Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate. Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor, the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to help him manage his career. As Salinas entered middle age his work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image. During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications. Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to remind me where I come from." After President Kennedy's death thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the private quarters of the White House. The connection to President Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964, when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly (1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would have to wait for a painting. In 1960, a half century after his birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin: Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings." Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981. He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers, including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest demand. Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio; the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as anthologies devoted to American Western Art...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 27 x 33 Frame Size: 35 x 41 Medium: Oil On Canvas Late 1940s-Early 1950s "Bluebonnet Time" Texas Hill Country Landscape Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work, however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique atmosphere. In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford (1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork, restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's store on Guadalupe Street. During the early years of World War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas. However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child, Christina Maria Salinas. Like most landscape artists of the era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the "Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for Mexican-American collectors. By the late 1940s, the American economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas. Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate. Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor, the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to help him manage his career. As Salinas entered middle age his work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image. During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications. Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to remind me where I come from." After President Kennedy's death thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the private quarters of the White House. The connection to President Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964, when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly (1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would have to wait for a painting. In 1960, a half century after his birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin: Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings." Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981. He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers, including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest demand. Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio; the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as anthologies devoted to American Western Art...

Well presented in a gilt effect frame. Signed. On board.

Presented in a gilt effect frame. Signed to the lower left corner. On board.

Buffalo, New York native John Folinsbee received his artistic training at the Art Student League in New York City with John F. Carlson, Birge Harrison, Frank DuMond, and Jonas Lie. A...

Lever (1876- 1958) is an Australian born artist who studied in both Paris and London. After moving to Mount Vernon, New York, he travelled extensively through New York, New Jersey,...

Suong Yangchareon (Thai American, 1952-) Acrylic on Canvas Los Angeles Street Scene with yellow taxi cab and cars. Hand signed with Initials. Dimensions: Overall Size: 25 1/4 x 49 1/4 in. Sight Size: 23 5/8 x 47 5/8 in. Yangchareon came to Los Angeles, California from Lampang, Thailand, Southeast Asia where he studied Fine Arts at the Arts & Crafts College (Poh Chang), Bangkok, Thailand and Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. In California he continued his studies at Woodbury University, receiving a degree in Advertising Design. He is a contemporary figurative realist artist. He painted the urban landscape of California, which have been exhibited in solo and group shows. His work is represented by prominent galleries nationally. Yangchareon spent much of his childhood at his father’s movie theater where he became fascinated with the world of American Westerns. The nostalgia for this idyllic film Americana can be garnered through his subject matter. Abandoned theaters, factories and businesses of an almost extinct era of architecture are carefully rendered in the soft morning light. Working from his own photography, shot during the early hours of the day, Yangchareon’s acrylic and oil paintings are largely devoid of human figures, but deeply imbued with their past presence. Recently, the artist has broadened his focus to include imagery of the city at night––rendering glistening rain-soaked sidewalks bathed in the artificial light of street lamps and movie marquees against an inky black sky. Yet, Yangchareon’s motivation remains the same; to find the hidden beauty in varying industrial landscapes and seeing splendor where most would argue it does not exist. Reminiscent of Edward Hopper, a sense of melancholy pervades his compositions in a quiet, detached manner. The influence of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud can also be detected in the artist’s sense of color and in his interpretation of light. Moody LA auto culture artwork dealing with themes of isolation and alienation. Select Exhibitions 2017 Golden Dreams, The Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University, Orange, CA 2016 In the Land of Sunshine: Imaging the California Coast Culture, Pasadena Museum of California Art 2016 Recent Paintings & Works on Paper, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2013–2014 Suong Yangchareon: Places Out of Time, St. Supéry Estate, Vineyards & Winery, Rutherford, CA 2012 Palm Springs Fine Art Fair, Palm Springs Convention Center LA Art Show, Los Angeles Convention Center Paintings, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA (solo) Texas Contemporary Art Fair, George R. Brown Convention Center, artMRKT San Francisco, Concourse Exhibition Center Art Chicago 2011, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 2010 San Francisco Fall Antiques Show, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA San Francisco Fine Art Fair, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA Art Chicago 2010, Merchandise Mart, Chicago IL 2009 Recent Paintings, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA (solo) 2008 Twenty-Five Treasures, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Fred Dalkey, Eileen David, Roy De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, David Fertig, John Graham, Robert Hudson, Ed Musante, Manuel Neri, Arthur Okamura, John Santoro, Richard Shaw, Pam Sheehan...

Emile Albert Gruppe was a very well known Cape Ann, Massachusetts painter who founded his own Gruppe Summer School in 1942. He was born in Rochester, NY in 1896 and studied at the A...

Julian Onderdonk (1882 - 1922) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 6 x 9 Frame Size: 10.75 x 13.75 Medium: Oil Dated 1910 "A Glowing Sky" SW Texas Julian Onderdonk (1882 - 1922) Known as...

A landscape mountain hillside oil painting on panel by artist Roy Henry Brown possible western scene. Painting is under glass. The image measures sight siz...

"Untitled (View of Provincetown Harbor)", is an oil on panel work made by Hans Hofmann circa 1937. The work is stamped verso by the estate of Hans Hofmann. The artwork size is 17 1/4...

In this piece, artist Paul Renard depicts his subject in a most romantic yet academic way. The artist was truly a master of capturing the magic and romance of the busy streets of Paris portraying the way of the times effortlessly. With much attention to detail and subtle brush strokes using a wide color pallet, a beautiful rendition of the street with figures is accomplished. We are reminded of the great impressionists of the early 20th Century such as Edouard Cortès in this piece. Paris in all of its glory in the "Roses in the Cart" is a pertinent example of how Renard achieves excellence in his work, leaving us with emotions of Paris in Autumn during dusk effortlessly. Signed lower right and comes housed in a wood carved museum quality...

The White Horse - Abstracted Landscape, In The Style Of Charles Heaney Abstracted landscape oil painting depicting a white horse. Attributed to and painted in the style of Charles Edward Heaney (American, 1897-1981). A white horse grazes alone in a grass field, as mountains of brown are intertwined with abstracted white clouds. Deep greens, browns and reds make up this piece. Presented in a distressed wooden frame. Frame: 21.5"H x 39"W Image: 15.5"H x 32.5"W Unsigned. Charles Heaney lived in Oregon and was primarily known for his landscapes of Oregon and Nevada. From 1917 until well into the 1920s, Heaney studied intermittently at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. One of his primary instructors was legendary painter Harry Wentz, who befriended and inspired him. A fellow student was Kyuzo Furuya who, Heaney recalled, goaded him into taking himself seriously as an artist. But Heaney's deepest friendship was with Clayton Sumner (C.S.) Price, an artist twenty-three years Heaney's senior who settled in Portland in 1929 and who would become a pioneering figure in Oregon modern painting. Heaney admired and emulated Price's dedication to art-making and found in the older man an important companion. Heaney's prints of the 1920s and 1930s were mostly woodcuts, a technique he learned from Catherine DeWitt MacKenzie, a fellow student at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. In the 1930s, he experimented with etchings with his friend William McIlwraith and studied intaglio processes with William Givler...

Julian Onderdonk (1882 - 1922) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 6 x 9 Frame Size: 19 x 22 Medium: Oil Dated 1909 "Near Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey" Julian Onderdonk (1882 - 1922) Known...

"The Young Artist" is an oil on panel painting made in 1926 by Grant Wood. The work is signed lower right, "Grant Wood". The painting size is 11 x 14 x 1 inches. The framed size is 2...

Artist: Ben Benn, Polish/American (1884 - 1983) Title: Roof Top Year: circa 1920 Medium: Oil on Canvas, signed l.r. Size: 24 x 18 in. (60.96 x 45.72 cm) Frame Size: 33.5 x 27.5 inche...

John Walter Stephan was an early member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. He was born in Chicago and studied art at the University of Illinois and the Art Institute o...

A tiny oil on card painting that Vasyl Hryhorovych Krychevsky (1872-1952) created in 1935 in Crimea, Ukraine. V.H.Krychevsky is one of the founders of the Ukrainian Art Academy in Ky...

Dunure Castle. Oil on canvas. 16 1/2 x 28 3/8. Signed, lower right. Housed in a dramatic 22 x 34-inch gold leaf frame. The ruins of Dunure Castle lie in a quiet location overlookin...

John Austin Hanna Born 1942 Fredericksburg Artist Image Size: 24 x 48 Frame Size: 28 x 52 Medium: Oil on Canvas Mercedes Benz 300SL "Gullwing" Coupe Ralph Lauren's personal vehicle Biography John Austin Hanna Born 1942 John Austin Hanna - Fredericksburg, Texas John graduated from Texas Tech University with a degree in Advertising Art & Design. As a 20-year illustrator in New York and Dallas he has been published in several magazines such as Automotive Quarterly, Car and Driver, Saga, Town & Country, Flying, Popular Boating, and Popular Science. He has also done work for several large corporations such as Mercedes, Volkswagen, Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, Borden’s, Pearl Beer...

The ship William Volckens by the maritime painter Antonio Jacobsen. Signed and dated lower right "Antonio Jacobsen, 1909". The Volkens flies both the American and Swedish flags. Oil ...

Emil (Soren Emil) Carlsen (1848 or 53 - 1932) Seascape with Boats Oil on Board, Signed, Measures ( 6 x 8.5 inches unframed ) w/frame ( 12.75 x 14.25 inches ) The painting is in goo...

Composition Cubiste aux Pecheurs by Marguerite Lacroux (French/ Swiss 1898-1972) signed oil on canvas, framed in original wooden studio frame framed: 32.5 x 40 painting: 31.75 x 39 ...

Very large scale late 20th century oil on canvas of Noah's Ark and the Animals by British artist Derek Carruthers. Signed to the bottom right. A magical, highly colourful and energe...

A superb portrait oil painting by noted British Newlyn school artist Harold Harvey. Painted in 1922 the sitter is Clara Matthews. A full length portrait, Clara is set in a landscape and holding a rose. In several of Harvey's portraits his female sitters...

Robert Harrison (Born 1949) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 30 x 40 Frame Size: 40 x 50 Medium: Oil "Bluebonnet and Cactus" Texas Hill Country Landscape Biography Robert Harrison (Bor...

Jose Vives-Atsara (1919-2004) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 32 x 58 Frame Size: 40 x 68 Medium: Oil Applied by Palette Knife Dated 1960 "Paisaje de Texas" Texas Landscape Biography ...