A boy from the Platte River town of Kearney in western Nebraska, Sammons first moved to Petaluma, California, in

1913 at the age of twenty seven. Three years later, he moved to the river town of Monte Rio, a short distance from the mouth of the Russian River, to open a studio. In 1917, he returned to Kearney, Nebraska, for three years, returning to California in 1920. He made his way to San Francisco and studied at the California School of Fine Arts. At this point, he transitioned his style from Tonalism to Impressionism.

As a young man, Sammons was an enthusiast of the automobile, and loved to take car trips and find new new scenes to paint. On one such trip to Northern California’s Humboldt County, Sammons met Queen Esther Steward in the town of Petrolia. They had much in common, both coming from large midwestern families, common religious beliefs, and an awe for the natural beauty of California. Queen made a fine traveling partner, and the couple toured the West, including all corners and climates of California, painting as they went.

Sammons is described as a quiet, soft-spoken and gentle man who could be warm and friendly when he was sketching or painting. He enjoyed having children watch him paint, often having them fetch a leaf or bark so he could get the color right. He was also a willing teacher, and had some notable students, including William Frates and Henry Vardon Going. Among his friends were artists Edward Borein, John Gamble, Deidrich Gremky, Paul Grimm, Lorenzo Latimer, and Thaddeus Welch.

The exhibit of 21 paintings includes sculptures of Arapahoe and Shoshone men from 1882.

George de Forest Brush acquired his painting skills in Paris and put them to use in the American West. He called himself an "ethnographer," using his art to address contemporary issues. His concern was that in his day's rush to industrialization and modernism, the world was losing its appreciation of art born of craft and tradition.

Young George's talent was noticed by a portrait artist while he as a child. He studied at the Academy of Design in New York and the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1882, he traveled to Wyoming and lived on the Wind River Reservation for several months and then traveled to Montana were he spent a year living among the Crow Nation. After he returned to New York, he taught at the Art Student's League where he composed some of his Indian paintings that quickly brought him to the attention of collectors. Throughout the 1880's, he focused on his Indian paintings, traveling to Florida and Canada hoping to paint Indians in their own environment.

In the 1890's, he radically changed his artistic focus to a more traditional mode, doing many paintings of his wife and children in the Madonna mode. In 1937, disaster struck - his studio and his home in Dublin, New Hampshire, burned. He never recovered from the loss, and died four years later in 1941.

But his 1880's work with Indians endures. They were popular with collectors of his day, providing a curse and a blessing. The curse was that they were spread widely among collectors and were never seen as a body of work. The blessing: many survive to this day. The National Gallery's exhibit will be the largest collection of these works. Should you be unable to travel to Washington and yet would like to see a similarly delightful and sensitive look at an amazing artist and "ethnographer," may we suggest a visit to the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah.

The curator of George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, is Nancy K. Anderson, curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art. She was also the curator and principal catalogue author for Thomas Moran (1997) and Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (2003). Visit The National Gallery Website Back to the Top

The Sower, 1888, Vincent van Gogh

The exhibit at MoMA runs through January 5, 2009. Afterward, it will be on exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam February 13 - June 7, 2009.

Throughout his career, Van Gogh depicted scenes at night. He refused to be bound merely by observation, but used his imagination as well. He intertwined the real and the symbolic, hoping to capture spiritual qualities he sensed alive in the world around him.

Pissarro says, “Van Gogh’s night scenes offer rich layers of significations and associations. Some show the strong relationship that he perceived between the cycles of nature and those of rural labor. Others evoke poetic associations of the evening with either the vagaries of life in modern times or with profound metaphysical questions. Van Gogh’s works and letters not only carried on the art historical tradition of twilight and night scenes but also reflected how his thoughts were influenced by abundant literary sources. The powerful technical innovation— Van Gogh’s signature—that he applied to capture the effects of dark and light proved to be a rewarding field of investigation.”

The exhibit divides Van Gogh's night scenes into four groups. "Early Landscapes" features Van Gogh's earliest landscapes at dusk, painted between 1883 and 1884. "Peasant Life" shows the peasants of Nuenen in the Southern Dutch province of Brabant, featuring The Potato Eaters in 1885. "Sowers and Wheatfields" shows Van Gogh's interest in the sowing of wheat, including The Wheat Sower from 1888. The last section, "Poetry of the Night" is split into two sections, "The Town" featuring works such as The Night Cafe 1888, and "The Country," centering on Van Gogh's painting, The Starry Night.

View the online exhibition | Back to the Top

As you look closer, the theft and destruction of Europe’s art treasures is but an extension of the murderous domination perpetuated by the Nazis. Their destroying and pillaging of Europe's art treasures was the same murderous act done to Europe's innocents, this time perpetrated on the artistic expressions of the vibrancy of culture itself.

Here's a nod to our clients and friends on the East Coast. In Portland Maine, The Portland Museum of Art exhibits impressionist masterpieces from the Brooklyn Museum Collection.

The exhibit includes works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Eugène-Louis Boudin, John Singer Sargent, George Inness, Childe Hassam, Camille Pissaro, Gustave Courbet, and their peers. The exhibit features forty works and explores the development of modern sensibilities found in the plein-air traditions of France and the United States.

Several paintings by Claude Monet will be shown, along with explanations of the master's regimen. After he selected a subject, he would position himself and observe his subject for hours over several days and in some cases for months, noting the changing light and atmospheric effects, and then would render a series of paintings of the same subject in different lighting and atmospheric conditions. Read more

In one of the most intense years of the Civil War, some attention was paid to the West. Nevada became the 36th state and Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Land Grant, protecting 39,000 acres and the neighboring Mariposa Big Tree Grove. And on scene to give people a sense of the grandeur of this land was Albert Bierstadt. He loved nature, adventure, and America and found all three in

• Beginning in October is our Specialties of Our Gallery, with a selection from each of the gallery's specializations, with emphasis on the artists and painters drawing the most enthusiastic response from gallery visitors.
  
  Grace Allison Griffith and associated watercolorists Lorenzo P. Latimer and Lisbeth Hoen.
  Nels Hagerup and Alexander Dzigurski seascapes.
  Southern California impressionists such as Dedrick Stuber, Gustav Magnussen and Karl Schmidt.
  A selection of desert painters John W. Hilton, Victor Clyde Forsythe, and Jimmy Swinnerton.
  Regionalists Ralph Baker and Milford Zornes.
  Alexander Nepote (very large) mixed media collages.
  Mid-Century landscape artists Ralph Love, Carl Sammons and Joshua Meador.
  
• See the newly-added video on our Alexander Dzigurski page entitled The Palette & Symphony.
  
• See what's new in our gallery's collection by visiting our "Recently Acquired" page.
  
  Among our new aquisitions is a group of small-sized modestly-priced Marin and Sonoma County scenes by Alex Dzigurski II.
  
• If you run across some interesting news from the art world, let us know. We may put it in the next issue.
  
• We have redesigned our website homepage and navigation. Let us know if the navigation of the site is to your liking, and what we could do to improve it
  
• Our Archives page has links to our previous gallery exhibits and monthly newsletters.
  
• Booklets of our Historic Painters of Carmel and Master Painters of the Sea are available. Pick one up at the gallery or send us your mailing address. Prior booklets are also available. Back to the Top