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Artist
|
Title | Thumbnail |
Notes old |
Media |
Signature status |
| George Jo Mess |
Valley Road |
 |
|
Oil on Board |
Signed Lower Left |
| Constance Forsyth |
Summer Creek |
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|
Watercolor on Paper |
Signed Lower Right |
| Constance Forsyth |
Seascape with Figures |
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|
Watercolor on Paper |
Signed Lower Left |
| George Herbert Baker |
Richmond Landscape |
 |
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This painting was featured in our weekly email on 10/25/13 along with the following gallery comments:
On offer this week is a very nice, original and intact piece from George Herbert Baker of Richmond, IN. Baker largely plied the local landscapes of Eastern Indiana for his oil and pastel output. In the context of his oils, this painting represents very well. While its subject and composition are both typical Baker the piece exhibits bold coloration and is overall, very ‘painterly’. And painterly tends to be Baker at his best. It’s housed in the original, unrestored, hand-carved frame and the painting itself is clean and in excellent condition.
–Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Art |
Oil on Board |
Signed Lower Left |
| Carl Rudolph Krafft |
Back From the Fields |
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|
Oil on Canvas |
Signed Lower Right |
| Carl Rudolph Krafft |
Roadside Cabin |
 |
SOLD
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This work was featured in our 2nd Annual Curated Sale of Historic Indiana Art, April 8th, 2018 at the Indianapolis Art Center.
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This painting was featured in our weekly email on 10/31/13 along with the following gallery comments:
Carl Krafft spent most of his career in Oak Park, IL and tends to be considered a ‘Chicago artist’. But in fact, he travelled frequently for fertile painting grounds. His earlier works focused on the Ozarks and indeed, some Brown County, IN subject matter. Later works such as this week’s Roadside Cabin incorporated more figures, structures and often a tableau in which many things were going on at once on a given canvas. Roadside Cabin is a charming example of Krafft’s later output — a horse and rider approaching a stone bridge in winter with a homestead in the background. Very evocative of man’s working relationship with pastoral beauty. A subject that was endlessly fascinating to Carl Krafft.
–Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Art |
Oil on Canvas |
Signed Lower Right |
| Kenneth Reeve |
Untitled |
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|
Graphite on Paper |
Signed Lower Right |
| Kenneth Reeve |
In My Merry Oldsmobile |
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|
Aquatint Etching |
Signed Lower Right |
| Kenneth Reeve |
The Country Store, Brown County, Indiana |
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|
Aquatint Etching |
Signed Lower Right |
| Kenneth Reeve |
The Oil Mill |
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|
Aquatint Etching |
Signed Lower Right |
| George Jo Mess |
In the Garden of Paradise |
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This painting was featured in our weekly email on 8/22/13 along with the following gallery comments:
George Jo Mess channels his inner Maxfield Parish. We’re pleased to offer one of the most significant pieces to ever come to market by this Indiana treasure. The theme, that of water nymphs (or ‘girls on rocks’ as Parish is quoted) was quite popular from 1910-1930. This masterwork highlights Mess’ inimitable treatments as well as his broad artistic range. We would place this painting’s creation at c. 1930. It has been in the same family since purchased from the artist and is completely fresh to market.
–Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Art
|
Oil on Canvas |
Signed Lower Right |
| John (Jan) Zwara |
Bison in the Big Horns |
 |
This painting was featured in our weekly email on 8/26/13 along with the following gallery comments:
Zwara’s body of work features more than a few pieces containing Western subject matter like this week’s Painting of the Moment. He was retained by the rail lines to paint pieces to hang in the passenger trains which traveled to the West Coast. That said, it’s also possible this was painted from a magazine image as he was also known to do. In viewing the painting, barely visible is the ‘grid’ that Zwara began with on the panel to keep the elements of the composition properly arranged and in perspective against themselves. It’s a common technique but interesting to view it here – an insight into the artist’s technique.
–Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Ar |
Oil on Board |
Signed Lower Left |
| Harry Engel |
Rag Rug |
 |
This painting was featured in our weekly email on 9/5/13 along with the following gallery comments:
Harry Engel enjoyed a 42 year career as a professor of painting at Indiana University in Bloomington and counted among his friends such noted art luminaries as Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Laski, Robert Motherwell , John-Paul Darriau and many others. His watercolor work tends to be traditional and representational. Yet his oils and encaustic pieces are fantastic abstractions featuring bold elements, screwed perspectives and often verge entirely into abstract expressionism. Rag Rug, which was exhibited in a 1971 IU retrospective of his work, is a classic example of his oil technique with the stilted interior and the playful treatment of the central figure and of course, that rug. Engel was vastly prolific and it’s somewhat of a mystery to me where his paintings are hiding. Though we’ve had a handful, I anticipate over time more will find their way to market and significantly raise the profile of Harry Engel – a true Hoosier treasure.
–Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Art |
Oil on Board |
Signed Lower Right |
| John Elwood Bundy |
Winter on the Whitewater |
 |
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original hand-carved frame re-leafed in 22K gold
This painting was featured in our weekly email on 9/13/13 along with the following gallery comments:
Winter on the Whitewater, painted in 1914, depicts one of Bundy’s favorite subjects, the Whitewater River running through Eastern Indiana. Downstream on the same river, the subject was famously portayed by T.C. Steel and J. Ottis Adams from various perspectives in Brookville, IN.
Contrasting with the more literal interpretation of interior beech forests, this very impressionistic winter piece shows Bundy painting at the height of his power, rendering his beloved Whitewater Valley in the full splendor of the season.
A very similar, larger painting, also created in 1914 and depicting the same scene and season is part of the Indiana University art collection and is currently displayed behind the registration desk at the IU Memorial Union (See end of this email to view). The IU painting is referenced in William Gerdts’ monograph on the artist:
Although autumn may have been his favorite season of all, many of Bundy's paintings are truly winter scenes, in which he concentrated on streams flowing between snowy banks, such as his 1903 Winter Afternoon (private collection) and his Winter on the Whitewater and Wane of Winter, both of 1914. In fact, Bundy's earliest contributions to the shows of the Richmond Art Association were pictures of "winter time." Bundy surely would have enjoyed, with John Burroughs, "the warmth that lurks in the frost" and might have agreed with him that "Winter has its own beauty, but let us admit it is not the beauty of life, of the leaf and the petal, but the beauty of the crystal or the gem."
(William H. Gerdts, “A Walk in the Woods: The Art of John Elwood Bundy” (1853-1933); Quoting from John Burroughs, "The Tonic of Winter," Country Life in America 19 (December Mid-Month, 1910))
A very important work by one of the most acclaimed painters in the history of Indiana art.
–Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Art |
Oil on Canvas |
Signed Lower Left |
| Anthony Buchta |
Bean Blossom Overlook |
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Exhibited in the 1948 Hoosier Salon(tag, verso) |
Oil on Canvas |
Signed Lower Right |
| Anthony Buchta |
Church in the Valley |
 |
SOLD
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This work was featured in our 2nd Annual Curated Sale of Historic Indiana Art, April 8th, 2018 at the Indianapolis Art Center.
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This painting was featured in our weekly email on 3/20/15 along with the following gallery comments:
Anthony Buchta hails from Iowa and studied at the Chicago Art Institute. He worked in Chicago for many years thereafter, teaching and doing commercial art work. He began traveling to Brown County in the late 1920s and moved there permanently in 1936. Church in the Valley is a very nice example of his work which I find straddles the line between painterly and ‘illustratorly’. The painting has been cleaned and conserved and the original frame has been re-leafed. A strong example from one of Brown County’s ‘second generation’ of artists.
- Curt Churchman, Fine Estate Art |
Oil on Canvas |
Signed Lower Right |
| Glenn Cooper Henshaw |
New York |
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|
Pastel on Paper |
Signed Lower Right |
| Glenn Cooper Henshaw |
Flat Iron Building |
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|
Pastel on Paper |
Signed Lower Left |
| Frederick Polley |
Brown County Landscape |
 |
numbered 9/100 |
Etching on Paper |
Signed Lower Right |
| Frederick Polley |
Untitled |
 |
numbered 12/50 |
Etching on Paper |
Stamped with Signature Lower Right |
