Catalog: Fine Art: Prints: Lithographs (4)

Original antique hand colored Lithograph of parrots from Mathew's The Birds of Australia. . Presented archival matted and framed. Overall framed size 13ʺW × 1ʺD × 16ʺH in excellent condition. This impeccable, hand-colored lithograph is from the first edition of Gregory Macalister Mathew's The Birds of Australia. The work was published in London by Witherby & Co. c. 1910. The artists that contributed to the work included J. G. Keulemans, Gronvold, R. Green, Goodchild, and Lodge. This work was the first major work on Australian birds since John Gould's and illustrated 100 further species than his work. It is also one of the last important natural history works to be illustrated with hand-colored lithographs. The edition was limited to 225 copies.

Pair of original hand colored horse lithographs from "Professor Low's Illustrations of the Breeds of the Domestic Animals London, 1840" . Drawn by Mr. Nicholson, R.S.A. from a painting by Mr. Shiels, R.S.A. Drawn on stone & printed by Fairland. Published by Longman, Orme, Brown , Green & Longmans, Paternoster Row, London 1840. Presented framed and matted in quality vintage burl wood frames. Measuring 12.5 x 17 inches, matte window 10" x 13" overall framed size 18" x 24" Low was a professor of agriculture at Edinburgh University who also set up an agricultural museum in Edinburgh with the assistance of a grant from Earl Spencer. William Shiels, member of the Royal Scottish Academy, was commissioned to produce a series of paintings of all the significant breeds then of economic significance in Great Britain. These paintings were then used as the basis for the present work with the addition of Low's text. Shiels' work is appreciated today for its faithfulness to the actual appearance of the animals, as opposed to idealized versions meant to please their owners, which were common at the time. William Nicholson, also a Royal Scottish Academy member, made the drawings after Shiels' paintings to convert them to prints.

Vintage print titled "Gathering" an original hand drawn stone lithograph by Raphael Soyer, the renowned Russian-born American realist painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Hand proofed and printed in 1977 by master printer Joseph Kleineman, JK Fine Art Editions Co. NY using ink on Arches paper 100% acid free, from a traditional lithographic stone (which Joseph recalls carrying himself to Soyer's studio on Manhattan's Upper West Side). Gathering depicts a sensitive, realistic NYC group portrait of young people, one couple entering the scene from the left holding hands, another couple making out in the background, and three women each facing a different direction in the foreground create an animated get-together that keeps the viewers attention. Soyer's masterly drawing style possesses a dynamic graphite pencil quality and quiet intimacy. GATHERING is a fine example of superb hand lithography printmaking at its best! Image size - 19" x 14" inches overall framed size 24" x 28".

A rare color lithograph by Wayne Thiebaud titled Coronado signed, numbered 5 of 15 and dated 1956. overall sheet size 16 x25 12.5 x 21.5 inches. A beautiful colorful modernist image of sail boats off the San Diego coast with the old Coranado Hotel in the left of the image. A very scarce print in excellent condition some slight discoloration from a previous matte.

Biography

A painter of pop-art realism combined with a great respect for traditional methods and subject matter, Wayne Thiebaud is one of the most prominent of the Bay Area painters in California in the latter part of the 20th century. His reputation spread far beyond his own state. In his painting, he focuses on the commonplace in a way that suggests irony and objective distance from his subjects. He also makes a point of keeping an independent distance from the New York art scene. He was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, and for one summer during his high school years he apprenticed at the Walt Disney Studio and then studied at an Los Angeles trade school the next summer. He earned a degree from Sacramento State College in 1941. From 1938 to 1949, he worked as a cartoonist and designer in California and New York and served as an artist in the United States Army. In 1950, at the age of thirty, he enrolled in Sacramento State where he earned a Master's Degree in 1952 and began teaching at Sacramento City College. In 1960, he became assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, where he remained through the 1970s and influenced numerous artist students. However, he did not have much following among Conceptualists because of his adherence to basically traditional disciplines, emphasis on hard work rather than creativity, and love of realism. On a leave of absence, he spent time in New York City where he became friends with Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline and was much influenced by these abstractionists as well as Pop Artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. During this time, he began a series of very small paintings based on images of food displayed in windows, and he focused on their basic shapes. Returning to California, he pursued this subject matter and style, isolating triangles, circles, squares, etc. He also co-founded the Artists Cooperative gallery, now Artists Contemporary Gallery, and other cooperatives including Pond Farm, having been exposed to the concept of cooperatives in New York. In 1960, he had his first one-man shows in San Francisco at the Museum of Art and New York at the Staempfli and Tanager galleries. These shows received little notice, but two years later, a 1962 New York Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition officially launching Pop Art, brought him national recognition although he disclaimed being anything other than a painter of illusionistic form. In 1963, he turned increasingly to figure painting, wooden and rigid with each detail sharply emphasized; in 1967 his work was shown at the Biennale Internationale, and in 1985, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.