New Works

Here is a selection of the gallery's most recent acquisitions
from various estate and public auctions, as well as private sales.

Just scroll down to see each painting.

Carl Gordon Cutler (1873-1945)

“Near the Artist’s Cottage”

Watercolor on paper, 19.5x 24.5”

$1800

Carl Gordon Cutler (1873-1945)

“Pink Rocks”

Watercolor on paper, 19.5x 24.5”

$1800

Carl Gordon Cutler (1873-1945)

“Looking South” Brooklin, Maine

Watercolor on paper, 16.5x 24.5”

Framed 30 x 37 in$2800

Carl Gordon Cutler was born in 1873 in Massachusetts. Though educated in the painting of portraits in oil, his two major artistic passions would become the landscape of Maine and the use of watercolor. His watercolors, influenced by Fauve color and John Marin's forms, were exhibited in Europe and the eastern United States, in Boston; Philadelphia; the Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City; and, farther west, at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; as well as Paris, France. Cutler had more than a dozen one-man shows in New York City and Boston.

Cutler studied in the late 1890s at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where influence of the old masters on the painting of oil portraits was strong. He also worked at the Academie Julian in Paris. Cutler had some exhibition success there, but it would take several years after his return to America before his mature style would appear. Cutler first painted the Maine coast soon after the Armory Show. By the mid-1920s, he was painting watercolors of the state's landscape exclusivelyviews of Deer Isle, Mount Desert, the Camden Hills and--for thirty summers, Eggemoggin Reach, where Cutler had a cottage. The artist received the plaudits of the critics and acclaim from the public. He spent the last 30 years of his career focusing entirely on painting Maine's Penobscot Bay region.

Carl Cutler was a respected color theorist. In his 1923 book Modern Color, with Stephen C. Pepper, he explained a detailed system involving a scale of 168 colors, telling how to imitate the appearance of natural light through their use. He also discussed emotion as a significant element in artistic creation. In 1994, the Vose Gallery, in Boston, put out a color brochure, Carl Gordon Cutler Along the Maine Coast 1873-1945. Also in the 1990s, the Babcock Gallery, in New York City, published Carl Gordon Cutler, American Modernist Rediscovered, a paperback with forty-four color reproductions and an essay. In 1998, the Portland Museum of Art, in Maine, held an exhibition, "Modern Color": Maine Watercolors by Carl Gordon Cutler, comprised of sixteen out of a total of fifty-nine Cutler watercolors bequeathed a year earlier to the Museum by Mr. and Mrs. James E. Haas. Also in 1998, the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine, exhibited fourteen of Cutler's Maine coastal landscapes painted in the South Brooksville area on the Blue Hill Peninsula.

Nathaniel Dirk (1895-1961)

Summer Sails, c.1937. Watercolor.

Image size 8 x 10, mat size 11 x 14

$900

Nathaniel Dirk studied at the Art Students League with Max Weber and Kenneth Hayes Miller and in Paris with Fernand Leger. Beginning in 1939 he taught at the League and lectured there on "Color for the Artist" from 1957 through 1960. He was president of the Cape Ann Society of Modern Art and a member of the Rockport Art Association. He exhibited widely, with thirteen one-man shows in New York City alone. Primarily known as a watercolorist, painting in a style similar to, but not as abstract, as that of John Marin. His work is represented in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago.

(From: Pam Koob, Curator, The Art Students League of New York)

Henry Martin Gasser (1909-1981)

Coastal Scene

Watercolor on paper, 12x 15”

$1800

Painter, lecturer, teacher, illustrator and author, Henry Gasser was born in Newark, New Jersey on Oct. 31,1909. He lived, studied and worked in New Jersey for his entire life. A Master at watercolor and oil his work consisted of, in his own words, "everyday subjects that are available to most of us-street scenes, back yards, trees, old houses, etc I looked for them in front of houses, in backyards, public parks, and elsewhere". He also painted numerous harbor and fishing village scenes. His work demonstrated a sense of place and feeling that most could identify with. He often "exhausted a subject" which becomes evident when viewing the body of his work for many of his paintings are just slight variations of previously completed compositions. His Paintings also contain a great deal of what he called "solitary silence" created by chosen subject matter such as a "Coming Storm", "Night in the Park", "Shadows"... He felt that Design was very important and meant the difference between a mediocre work and a truly professional one. It is here where Gasser excelled, his work demonstrates a sense of composition that gained wide spread appreciation for his work.

He got his background in art studying at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and the Grand Central School of Art. This was followed by study at the Art Students League of New York in the classes of Robert Bracman. He later studied privately under John R. Grabach. He is represented in over fifty museum collections and numerous important private ones as well. Among the awards that Henry Gasser has received are the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy, the Zabriskie, Osborne, and Obrig prizes at the American Watercolor Society, the Philadelphia watercolor club prize, the Allied Artists Gold Medal at Oakland, California and many others. He was a member of the National academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society, the Royal Society of Art (Great Britain), the Salmagundi Club, the Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington Watercolor Clubs and the New Jersey Watercolor Society. He was a life member of the National Arts Club, Grand Central Art Galleries and the Art Students League and others. He served as Director of the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art from 1946-54 then continued lecturing and demonstrating for most of the remainder of his life. He also wrote numerous books on painting. He died in Orange, NJ in 1981.

Harrison Bird Brown (1831-1915)

Coastal Landscape c.1874

Oil on Canvas 9x15

in original ornate gold leaf frame 14x19

$6000 with Original Frame

Harrison Bird Brown (1831-1915)

View of Grand Manan

Oil on Canvas 10x18

$5500 With new ornate Frame

Harrison Bird Brown was born in 1831 in Portland, Maine, and is best known for his White Mountain landscapes and marine paintings of Maine's Casco Bay. By 1860, Brown was being praised as a leading American marine painter.

Landscape painting was popular in the mid 19th century, thanks in part to the influence of Charles Codman (1800-1842), whose paintings were collected for their very romantic sentiments. It is possible that Brown saw examples of Codman's poetic paintings, and was influenced by his works. Brown was one of the early artists to paint the coastline of Maine's Monhegan Island, where he depicted the headlands as awesome, mystical forces. Humanity versus nature, and the human relationship to nature, themes prevalent in mid and late-19th century literature and philosophy, figured frequently in his seascapes.

He often painted in the White Mountains, and his name can be found in the guest registers of many places artists frequented in those mountains. The coast of Maine was also a favorite painting venue of Brown's for over thirty years. He depicted the wholesome outdoor environment of the state, with special fondness for the Casco Bay area and Grand Manan, an island off the New Brunswick, Canada coast. Brown also produced two widely distributed illustrations of Crawford Notch for the Maine Central Railroad in 1890.

Harrison Bird Brown exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1858 to 1860, and at the Boston Athenaeum and Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. By 1892 he had become the best known native Maine painter of his time, and gained fame for himself and the state with a large canvas in the Maine pavilion of the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago. In 1892 he was elected president of the Portland Society of Art.

That same year, however, he moved to England to be with his only surviving child, a daughter, and spent the last twenty-three years of his life there. Most of his paintings were completed in New England before he moved to London, but he continued to paint until his death in 1915. Harrison Bird Brown's works can be seen at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and at the Portland Museum of Art.

William Lester Stevens (American, 1888-1969)

Barn in the Valley

Signed "W. LESTER STEVENS N.A." l.r.
Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 in.

Framed, price available upon request

Born in Rockport, Massachusetts, Stevens spent four years at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts School, where he studied under Edmund Tarbell, among others. Primarily an oil painter, he also used watercolor and acrylics. He is best known for his post-impressionistic landscapes. Throughout the course of his long career, Stevens taught, first in Rockport, then at Boston University (1925-1926) and Princeton (1927-1929), and during the Depression at Grand Manan.

He was a National Academician and a member of the American Watercolor Society; a founding member of the Rockport Art Association; Springfield, MA Art League; Guild of Boston Artists; Gallery on Moors; New Haven Paint and Clay Club, CT; Gloucester Society of Art; North Shore Art Association; Boston Watercolor Club and the New York Watercolor Club. He won art awards at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; American Watercolor Society; New Haven Paint and Clay Club; Springfield Art League; Salons of America; Washington Watercolor Club; North Shore AA; Rockport AA and more. He painted USPO murals in Dedham and Rockport, MA, the Boston City Hall, the Louisville, KY Art Museum and several schools in Boston. References: Movalli, Charles, American Artist (April 1986); Who’s Who in American Art (1947); Who Was Who in American Art (vol. 3, p. 3171-72).

Fall Colors, Blue Hill, Maine

Dennis Poirier

24 x 30 Oil on Canvas

SOLD

Moonrise over East Blue Hill Village

Dennis Poirier

6 x 8 Oil on Canvas

$550

Winter Morning, Maine

Dennis Poirier

4 x 6 Oil on Canvas

$250

Dennis Poirier grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He began his studies Butera School of Art in Boston, then returned to Cape Ann to study with John C. Terelak and Ted Goerschner at the newly formed Gloucester Academy of Fine Arts. Later he moved to New York City to study at the Arts Student League winning the Charles J. Romans Memorial Award at his very first national exhibit at the Allied Artists of America Show.

Dennis is a member of many prestigious art associations including the Oil Painters of America, North Shore Arts Association,Rockport Art Association, the Copley Society of Art (a Copley Artist), the Hudson Valley Arts Association, and the Academic Artists Association.

Ken Knowles

The Old Sloop

16 x 20 Oil on Linen

$3250 Framed

Roger Deering

Goat Island Light From Cape Porpoise, Maine

14" x 18" Oil/Canvas

$2000.

Endurance

by William Marvin

12" x 9"

$800

Summer Pasture

William McLane, Jr.

oil on canvas, 12" x 16"

$900

The works of William McLane, Jr. are highly collectible and hang in galleries and homes throughout the United States and abroad. His artwork is particularly well known on the East Coast – especially on the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and the coast of Maine. He is a member of the Artist's Association of Nantucket. He is a versatile painter whose work varies from abstract to impressionism always with an effective vibrant use of color and excellent composition.

Autumn Glory

Oil on linen, 20" x 31"

Dennis Sheehan

$3650

Narcisse Virgil Diaz de la Peña (1808-1876)

Fontainebleau Forest Interior

Signed "Diaz" l.l., artist identified on a label affixed to the reverse.

Oil on board, 12 1/4 x 10 in.

antique frame 16 x 18 in.

Price available upon request

Narcisse Diaz, a French landscape and figure painter and founding member of the avant-garde Barbizon school, was born in Bordeaux of Spanish parents. His parents were refugees from Joseph Bonaparte's Spain. By the age of ten, he was a penniless orphan in the care of a priest at Bellevue near Paris.(1). The young Narcisse, who had lost one of his legs to blood poisoning, was apprenticed as a pottery decorator in Paris at the age of 15, (2) which may account for his later predilection for bright colors and his rather free draftsmanship.(3) His handicap, and its impact on his mobility, were to be determinant in the course of his future career. As was a common practice, Narcisse learned to paint at the Louvre, where he was drawn to the works of the colorists. His early inspiration came most notably from Correggio, whose Antiope he repeated and interpreted in his own Nymphe Endormie (also in The Louvre).

Among his contemporaries, Narcisse had two spiritual fathers: Eugène Delacroix with his orientalist nymphs, Turks and Bohemians, (4) and Théodore Rousseau, with whom he became friends at Barbizon in 1836 and who gave him a taste for the Dutch masters. Narcisse first exhibited at the Salon between 1831 and 1837. From 1837 to 1844, he was a founding member of the Barbizon school, named for a small village at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. It was during this period that his future greatness became manifest. During the ensuing years, he was awarded three Salon gold medals for painting, and, in 1851, was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor. At the 1846 Salon, Narcisse's entries garnered the praise of Théophile Gautier: "There is in painting, as in music, a purely sensual side, in which the eye delights in the color - as the ear delights in the note - for its own value and sonority ... A major green or a minor yellow are delicacies which charm the eye. One can but admire the love of hues for their own sake which Diaz manifests, and on which his reputation rests."(7) With the Salon of 1848, the Barbizon School of painters became a definite, recognized entity, dominating French landscape painting through the late 1860's. (8)

Forest Interior (oil on board, 20" x 12")
by Maria a Becket (1840-1904)
Gold Leaf frame, 33" x 29"

price available upon request

Maria a' Becket was a well listed American painter who is cited in many American art references of her era. She was born in 1840 in Portland, Maine, Daughter of Charles Beckett, a Maine Landscape and genre painter. In 1865 she studied with Homer Dodge Martin and later with William Morris Hunt in Boston. She was influenced by the Barbizon painters at Pont Aven and painted with the famous French painter Charles Daubigny during a trip to France. At this time she changed her name to a’ Becket. Maria a’ Becket was a woman artist far ahead of her time; her palette is strong dense, deep with greens, burnt sienna, deep blues, and a mature loose brushstroke that one seldom acquires in a short artistic career displaying her natural talent as well as the experience gained by studying with the masters of early impressionism. Though her Barbizon influence is often stressed, this work reveals strong elements of Impressionism and is similar to her seminal work “Northern Lights”. She exhibited at the Boston Art Club in 1875, the National Gallery in 1883 and 1888, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1880 to 1884 and the New York’s Women’s Club to name just a few. It is only recently that we have fully recognized the great talents of our American women painters and started to give them the praise which they so richly deserve. This new realization has enhanced public demand for the exhibition of these rediscovered early masterpieces of American painting.

This work is in great condition considering it is a19th century painting. It is an exquisite oil on canvas that exudes her brilliant tonalist eye with wonderful impasto effects creating reflections and light play in the manner of Diaz de la Pena (see above) It is signed front lower right , has been professionally cleaned and fully guaranteed to be an original oil done and hand signed by Maria a' Becket.

Foret d'Autumne

P. Dumont

AUTUMN FOREST ca 1930

oil on canvas 19 x 25
Period Gold Frame; 24 x 30
signed lower right "P. Dumont"
Condition: excellent with no restoration

This post-Barbizon era painting is reminiscent of the extraordinary forest interiors painted on site in the forest of Fontainebleau by the first generation of Barbizon painters, particularly Rousseau and his pupil Diaz de la Pena.