American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery
(Please Scroll Down and Page Ahead--Catalogue is Alphabetical by Artist Last Name)
Two Beal Beauties Full of Joyful Color
Artist Name:       Reynolds Beal
Artist Dates:       1867 - 1951
Title:    On the Charles at Cambridge  Painting Date:      1949
Medium:             Oil on Artist Bd
Signature:           Signed Lower Right
Provenance:         Private Collection
Condition:            Excellent
Size Unframed:    16 x 24
Frame Condition:  Antique worn
Artist Best Price:  $107,000
Offered At:          CALL
Artist Name:       Reynolds Beal
Artist Dates:       1867 - 1951
Title:      Catskill Prospect: Eddyville  Painting Date:      1915
Medium:             Oil on Canvas
Signature:           Signed Lower Right
Provenance:         Private Collection
Condition:            Excellent
Size Unframed:    30 x 36
Frame Condition:  Mint Gold Antique
Artist Best Price:  $107,000
Offered At:           CALL
Curator's Comments: Reynolds Beal helped drive American impressionism as the 20th century got underway. Like Lever and Lawson, he favored the Fauvistic direction, with its strong link to the radical child like innocence of the American land. His Catskill Prospect focuses on Eddyville, a toy town surrounding the captured meander known as Pond Eddy. The river is the Roundout, flowing from the heart of the Catskills, into the Hudson at Kingston, whose back border is marked by the New York Central railroad bridge. Eddyville is listed as Number 145 in the Sidney Bressler Catalogue Raisonne. Matisse and Derain appealed to impressionists like Beal who fell in love with their use of raw color and the simplicity of perspective favored by the Americans. Beal also studied their brushwork with its frenetic choppy strokes. And Beal transcended his local influences, building on the use of color that started with the tonalism he got from Henry Ward Ranger and the focus on light at the heart of Childe Hassam's impressionism, with the two young men painting together at times.  In 1919 he was selected with Hassam, Glackens and other prestigious painters to exhibit at the Luxembourg in Paris. The lower Hudson valley was ground Beal knew well having hiked it many a time while in long residence from 1895 on at the family mansion called Wilellyen near Newburgh, New York, which had an unobstructed hillside view of the Hudson. Beal was supported by his gas magnate father and spent the golden years, as he called them, at home thru 1914. He was born in the Bronx in 1867 and spent his childhood exploring and sketching the East River. He studied ship design at Cornell, and art at the Art Students League with John Twachtman and with William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock School. From 1900 to 1907, he painted almost exclusively at the artist's community in coastal Noank, Connecticut with Henry Ward Ranger. After his break with Ranger in 1912, Beal focused more on the Hudson River Valley. He was most active artistically from 1910 to 1920, and his masterpiece Eddyville is dated 1915. He exhibited at the Clauson Gallery (NY) and Kraushaar Gallery (NY) as early as 1929, and by 1934 he was an active participant in the Salmagundi Club, Lotus Club, Century Club, National Academy of Design and the American Water Color Society. Later, Beal turned his focus on Rockport and Gloucester in Massachusetts. His studio overlooked Rockport's Inner Harbor, and he emphasized marine watercolors, and always his beloved traveling circus subjects, where he could capture the child like aspects of clowns and performers.
But for Beal the ultimate master was Van Gogh and he studied Walter Pach's book on the genius along with everything he could see or read. "Van Gogh," said Beal, "took the impressionist idea of broken color to give light effect, and carried it father by drawing in color." This is a difficult statement to understand, yet it stands at the heart of Beals' art, with its almost refractory technique that begins by reducing color only to rebuild an overarching colorist unity--as in the orchid and heliotrope and amethyst and indigo and violet of Eddyville, where everything comes from red and blue. Beal sailed often in the Caribbean, as his yachting scenes show. At sea in the tropics he was again deeply challenged by the light and living color of the islands, which  infused his Catskill works as well. His most complex and vibrant works are composed with a mosaic of brush strokes and literal streams of color. At the end of his career, Beal commenced a series of works on 24-inch board, which said goodbye to his favorite harbors in Rockport, San Juan, Cambridge and Maine. These are joyous works showing sailboats contending with the ebbing tide drawing the river back into the sea. They are anxious to leave the harbor and unafraid to follow the current taking them. Beal, who died in 1951, knew where. That he could celebrate at this time is a tribute to the love of wind and water that gleams in his work.  We are proud to offer another Beal gem, On the Charles at Cambridge, that is so much a symbol of the painter's earthly joy.
Reynolds Beal ca. 1920
Sandy Bay Regatta brought $76,000 in 2000
Echo Bay, New Rochelle brought $107,000  in 1994
You may contact us at: Click on link for:
Home Artist Directory
Terms & Conditions
Phone: 646-239-6142
Prior Catalogue Page Next Catalogue Page
Email:
director@dryadsgreengallery.com