American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery (Please Scroll Down--Catalogue is Alphabetical by Artist Last Name)

Artist Name:         Bruce Crane Artist Dates:         1857-1937 Painting Title:       Hamptons Sunset Painting Date:      Undated Medium:              Oil on  Canvas Signature:             Signed Lower Right Provenance:          Private Collection Condition:            Rebacked Size Unframed:    25x 30 Size Framed:         31 3/8 x 36 3/8 Frame Condition:  Antique Some Wear Artist Best Price:   $49,465 Our Price:            SOLD

Curator's Comments: Bruce Crane, who was born Robert Bruce Crane in New York City in 1857, was a contemporary and friend of our favorite John Francis Murphy, both of the artists having studied with Wyant (1836-92). But Crane lived long enough to complete the transition from Wyant’s 19th-century pleine aire work to full Tonalism and then to Impressionism. Crane first worked as a draftsman for a number of years, then started with Wyant in the mid 1870s. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York and then went to France, where he took up the Barbizon style under the tutelage of Cazin in Grez-sur-Loing. He returned in the 1880s, when he painted in the Adirondacks and where he wrote to his father that among the influential painters working nearby at the time were Eastman Johnson, George and James Smillie, and Samuel Colman. It was Colman who led Crane to East Hampton, on the far end of Long Island, where he started painting during the summer of 1880 or 1881 and where he met other important American painters, including Thomas Moran. From the Hamptons, Crane wrote to his father that he had “finished the study of an old cottage, which they say is exceedingly good," and which we believe refers to the work we are now proud to offer. In these early works, Crane painstakingly reproduced the pastures, hayfields, and barnyards of rural East Hampton, of which the critic Charles Teaze Clark later remarked that "the bright luminous atmosphere of a summer's day was given in these pictures, not only with truth to nature and a certain poetic sentiment, but with a brilliant sparkling quality of effect.” Working from thumbnail sketches, Crane often completed his paintings in his winter studio in Bronxville, New York, itself the site of an artist colony that at the time included Ernest Lawson. We prefer Crane's early tonalist works, which seem to memorialize his discovery of the richness of the atmospheric color spectrum that he shows with typical yellow and orange, here washed with the green reflections from the landscape.  These are rare finds, and Hamptons Cottage at Sunset is a beautifully painted bravura early work in good condition.  As Crane moved into the high tonalist style, which he explored under the influence of Henry Ward Ranger, his palette turned somber, and in 1884, he announced  that he had "put an end to green pictures,"  in the style of his joyful Hampton scenes. This may reflect his first wife's growing alcoholism, and Crane's first marriage ended in a troubled divorce that saw him marry his 21-year-old artist step-daughter. From 1904 on, Crane rented a series of houses in Old Lyme, joining with its resident summer art colony, and he continued to focus on nature in the high Tonalist style, which had brought him membership in the National Academy and eventually three canvases now in the Smithsonian. But after World War I, Crane favored a moody-grey impressionism and along with stark, barren images, and his best work is now regarded as the Tonalist production of the 1890s and the first decade of the new century.

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