George Spencer Watson - Portrait of Betty McCann [1927]

George Spencer Watson Portrait of Betty McCann 1927, originally uploaded by Art & Vintage.

Kenneth Frazier - Woman with a Rose [1891-92]

Kenneth Frazier, born in 1867, was an illustrator who worked in a hybrid of Art Nouveau, Impressionist and Realist styles. The watercolours Portrait of a Fortune Teller and Portrait of a Stylish Woman explore his type of illustration, which reflected increasing female sophistication. He exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show in New York City - the first major introduction of modern art and modern artists to America.

Edouard Bernard Debat-Ponsan - The Daughter Of Jephthah [1876]

Edouard Debat-Ponsan (1847 - 1913) was born in Toulouse, April 25, 1847 and died in Paris, January 29, 1913. He is considered an important portrait and landscape painter from the French school. Debat-Ponsan received his formal training at l’ Ecole des Beau-Arts under Cabanel. In 1874, he was awarded prix Troyon at the Institute and in 1875, second in the prix de Rome. In 1889, Edouard Debat-Ponsan was invited to exhibit at the Universal Exhibition. He was awarded a bronze medal for “Le Portrait equestre du General Boulange” which he refused. Ponsan was very dissatisfied with how the exhibition was organized and how the judging was conducted. He very abruptly removed his painting and returned to France.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Harvesters [1565]

This panel is part of a series showing the seasons or times of the year, commissioned from Bruegel by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. The series included six works, five of which survive. The other four are: "The Gloomy Day," "Hunters in the Snow," and "The Return of the Herd" (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); and "Haymaking" (National Gallery, Prague). This remarkable group of pictures is a watershed in the history of Western art. The religious pretext for landscape painting has been suppressed in favour of a new humanism, and Bruegel''s unidealised observation of the local scene is unified by his profound understanding of Italian Renaissance compositional principles.

[Oil on wood, original painted surface 116.5 x 159.5 cm]

Constant Troyon - Coast Near Villers [c.1859]

Constant Troyon (French, 1810 - 1865) was the third generation of his family to be employed at the Sèvres Manufactory decorating porcelains. In his spare time, he began to sketch in the Fontainebleau Forest, where he met other painters who would become associated with the Barbizon School. Troyon was a gifted marine painter and, in the early 1850s, acquired a house at Villers which he named The Academy of Landscape. He worked here closely with several young painters, including Eugène Boudin. After seeing the works of the Dutch 17th-century masters Paulus Potter and Albertus Cuyp during a tour of the Netherlands and Belgium in 1847, Troyon decided to specialize in animal genre subjects. In this view of an impending storm near the resort village of Villers-sur-Mer, the artist presents a cross section of society: a peasant couple riding on ponies equipped with baskets for carrying seaweed, a sportsman from town strolling with his gun, and hunters erecting fowling nets.

[Oil on canvas, 67.4 x 95.7 cm]

Henri Le Fauconnier - Little Schoolgirl [1907]

Henri Le Fauconnier (Hesdin, July 5, 1881 - Paris, December 25, 1946) was a French cubist painter. As an artist he is somewhat forgotten today, although he played an important role in the spread of cubism.

[Oil on canvas, 73 x 92.5 cm]

Will Hicok Low - An Arcadian Pool [1891]

Will Hicok Low, born in Albany, New York, in 1853, was a leading muralist and figurative painter who explored both Barbizon landscape and a colourful Victorian style. He studied with academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome from 1872-1877, in Paris. He was the second husband of artist Mary MacMonnies Low, and a friend of writer Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, New York City, elected an Associate in 1888, and an Academician in 1890.