Inspired by the success of artist contemporaries such as Francis A. Silva and Alfred T. Bricher found painting luminist scenes, Warren Sheppard sets out to capture the serene essence of a fading day within this painting of the American East Coast. He physically glistens the wet sand with soft reflective color before and after the beached hull compressed by age and the unrelenting surf. At sea a schooner catches the late wind and sets a course back to port. It is peaceful yet lonely scene, and a solid atmospheric composition that uses light and color to project its content. This is a very early work by the artist, we feel, of a favorite beach in his home state.

The subtle interplay of colors works in this instance as the deep gray-green ocean rises in a short wave break, most likely along the outer New Jersey shore. The horizon glows with a warmth of rose, and the clouds are driven from the sky. The entirety is simply worked into the composition in a very tight, natural order.

Sheppard has worked layers of elements into the picture with an interesting horizontal, left to right presentation. The horizon divides the realms and yet is countered by the dark hulk. The shore break splits the swell while its rhythm carries perfectly through the reflection cast across it. Everything reads left to right until the sky once again draws the eye back around to revisit and inspect the overall fine work. The emotional center draws not from the bones of the ship, but from the visit to the shore itself.

A very important moment of history for the United States Navy, the assembled mass of naval might is on formal review by President William Howard Taft and his Secretary of the Navy while on progress down the Hudson River into New York Harbor. The last of the Armed Cruiser Class met the first of the American Dreadnaught Battleships, U.S.S. ARKANSAS and WYOMING, on this epic occasion on October 14, 1912. More than 100 navy vessels from auxiliary ships to the largest of battleships were on display.

President Taft, a huge man prone to be somewhat reactionary in his decisions, if history in hindsight is allowed to make such judgements, was impressed with the direction of the country’s naval growth. He inherited the policies of President Theodore Roosevelt, and expanded the American presence throughout the hemisphere. In the midst of having decided not to campaign against Roosevelt and eventual winner Woodrow Wilson, President Taft chose to go aboard ARKANSAS (BB-33) and cruise to inspect the newly begun canal zone in Panama.

Showing his unique artistic style, Hayley Lever made a sensational impact in New York City starting in 1911 with his interpretive Post-Impressionism of such aggressive texture, brushwork and coloration. On hand to witness this epic moment, the New York Times wrote that the event was “the greatest assemblage of naval strength ever assembled.”

A consummate professional artist, Clark took great care to enjoy his life with his wife and son, Alson Jr. Extremely well traveled, and maintaining a residence in Paris, he settled into California to recover from an injury to his hearing in World War I. In this last quarter century he blended epic historic murals for the Los Angeles Cathay Circle Theater and the Pasadena Playhouse, with beautiful local scenes Clark discovered and caught with oil on canvas. Here he has locked in a precious view of the beach goers of Santa Monica.

The summer activity is in full swing, as far as the middle season may last nine months or more in California. The vast sea of beach umbrellas and the field of colors they cast drew Clark to linger and paint. Quite interesting choice is his semi-isolation, southside near the pier’s decaying underbelly with the tire inner-tube rental business languishing along with the rest. Bathers idly spend the day, with the Santa Monica Mountain to the north spanning from Topanga to Malibu and Point Dume in contrast to the hot clean California sand under Clark’s feet. While he painted many California scenes, they very rarely ever come out of private collections onto the art market.

Sensations of walking barefoot through cold, wet sand on a hot summer day are not to be taken for granted. After fighting in the American Civil War just years prior, Conrad Wise Chapman held this thought or a like one for many years. He celebrated his worldwide journeys with small panoramic paintings which feature people at leisure in their natural surroundings. The gray skies of the coast of France are famous over the globe, and for a handful of years after 1867, Chapman reveled in their cool presence.

The period dress of the well-to-do middle class is observed in the women sitting on wooden, four-legged chairs at the beach, watching the couple who are holding hands in the surf and the smallish manned sailing skiffs about their business. Flagged anchorage poles line the edge of the shelf, so inbound boats make find their marks. Some others frolic is the ocean as well. In the great distance, a large sailing ship and a steamer make for the headland ports across from the Normandy’s Côte Fleurie (Floral Coast). Chapman’s beach scenes of Trouville and nearby Deauville achieved his widest recognition for their fine aesthetic quality within his lifetime career. They are similar to the most important paintings of Eugene Boudin of people at the beach in this very same period.

Deep coloration presides in this painting, backlit with the luminous finale of a warm day off the New York Coast. This painting is from a view northeast of Long Island, looking southwest at the elevations of Montauk Point and Long Island Proper. De Haas, well familiar with the sailing environs of greater New York, and well beyond the waters of the sound.

The burnished sky glows with a range of warm yellows, with the cloud caps blazing strongest as the sun, well, sets. The largest ship, a steam-sail merchantman running perpendicular to the wind, cuts through the scene with several schooners sailing on the horizon for parts elsewhere. A two-masted lugger was an uncommon but not unknown of sight in New York waters, as several were used as life saving vessels as well as fishers, in part due to their very quick directional handling. Even at this distance, they are working their sailing to keep clear of the large ship.

Deep ocean currents cut through the North Atlantic, and de Haas shows he has given them notice, for his water portrays some of the chaotic action of the swells near the coastlines. In an interesting manner, he chose to impart the difficulties of vision a setting sun at sea creates, with the darkening of the lower elevations, and the brightest illumination existing on the undersides of the clouds, rising even beyond the reach of the tall ship’s masts. The last moments of precious daylight will be met with oil lamps and extended watches as the sailors head away and toward New York.

This painting is attributed to Gustave Courbet, and although listed as a collaboration in Jean Fernier’s forthcoming catalogue raissoné supplement of the artist’s work, it is our opinion that this painting is pure Courbet with possibly some assistance by Louis Augustin Augin who was, at the time it was painted, a student of Courbet in the region of Saintonge. The masterful technique used to portray the sky, sea and sand as well as the coloration in the rocks strongly suggests Courbet’s touch.

In a simple composition (also a Courbet trait) believed to be the coastline near the village of Royan, Courbet would have quite possibly been offering an example to his student and helper of how to capture the beautiful austerity of nature. Courbet’s brilliant use of thick layers of paint applied with a palette knife is another of the traits quite evident in this work.

The quality of this painting is in keeping with other examples by this important Barbizon artist. The wonderful balance of the dramatically colored sea beneath the soft clouds is bisected by the tall rocks that divide the view. It shows Courbet painting “things as they really are” the guiding principal in his work that marked his greatness.