Press Release

Spanierman Gallery, LLC at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on November 20, 2008 of Little Gems . This exhibition presents fifty works measuring no larger than eight-by-ten inches. More affordable than larger examples of equal quality, these selections are ideal for holiday gifts, while providing many opportunities for new collectors.

Although the exhibition includes a few European examples, such as a small Barbizon-style oil of the Forest of Fontainebleau (1830s) by the French painter Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña and a lush painting of a pink gladiolus (1910s) by the Dutch painter Jan Voerman Jr, most of the works are by American artists and created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several artists rendered coastal scenes, their circumscribed formats allowing them to focus in on the sparkle of light on sails or the linear patterns of ship rigging, as in works by Conrad Wise Chapman, Hayley Lever, and Winthrop Turney. Others, such as Alson Skinner Clark, Harry Fenn, and Elwyn George Gowen concentrated on interplay of sea and land, whether portraying ocean as the surface of the image or the way that the solidity of rock formations offset the translucent properties of a waterway.

The venerable tradition of landscape painting in America is carried on in many images in which artists framed their perceptual awareness in aesthetic terms, treating natural forms with varying degrees of pictorial modification. This trajectory may be seen in works by artists associated with the style of American Tonalism, including Henry Ward Ranger, John Francis Murphy, William Merritt Post, Charles Harold Davis, William Fitler Crothers, and Charles Caryl Coleman. Artists such as Robert Emmett Owen and Eliot Candee Clark focused on content, the former portraying a proverbial New England barn and the latter the birch trees that have been a beloved and quintessential emblem of New England from the time of the Transcendentalists through Robert Frost. Their legacy is carried on by the contemporary artist Peter Poskas, who concentrates his attention on capturing the qualities and remnants of Old New England that remain with us today. He is represented in the exhibition by a coastal image in oil of Monhegan Island , Maine , in which a white umbrella by the sea evokes both associations with the past and the present. Other artists used the effect of light in nature to create vivid arrangements of color as may be seen in The Fire of Autumn (ca. 1877) a rare early work by Willard Metcalf and Landscape with Trees (ca. 1890s), a nearly abstract pastel by Philip Leslie Hale. How our experience of a landscape lingers in our cognitive awareness is the subject of the art of the contemporary painter Pamela Szytbel, who is included in the exhibition with two images of landscapes that seem to be both recognizable and to be fading from our memory at the same time, one a winter scene in oil and the other a monotype of a path leading to a cottage.

Other works in the exhibition are by Douglas Allen, Frederic M. Grant, Charles Paul Gruppe, Harry Fenn, Elmer Stanley Hader, Friedrich Heimerdinger, Ambrose Kennedy, Louis Aston Knight, Peter Moran, Jerome Myers, Lionel S. Reiss, Gayle Blair Tate, Mary Chumar Trask, and Joellen Trilling.