Elliott Daingerfield (American, 1859 – 1932)

“Woodland Feast” Oil on Panel. 7 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches.

Elliot Daingerfield is considered one of North Carolina’s most prolific artists. Elliot was born in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina. At 21 he moved to New York to study art.

Elliot was inspired by the European Symbolist movement during his time overseas. Elliot’s influences included Impressionism and Romanticism in general to include the artist Ralph Albert Blakelock.

Daingerfield’s first exhibit was at the National Academy of Design in 1880, and after studying in Europe c.1897, The Lady Chapel of the Church of St. Mary, The Virgin in New York City in 1902. In 1971, the North Carolina Museum of Art displayed 200 of Daingerfield’s paintings; the museum currently displays “Grand Canyon” and “Evening Glow.”

Elliot married twice. His first wife, Roberta Strange French, died during childbirth in 1891. His second wife, Anna Grainger (married 1895), bore two daughters named Gwendoline and Marjorie.

Heritage Square in Fayetteville exhibits Daingerfield’s teenage home. The Sandford House showcases the South Parlor as “The Daingerfield Room,” and displays Daingerfield’s painting entitles “Angel of Beauty.”

Elliot Daingerfield is buried in Cross Creek Cemetery at Fayetteville.

“Arab Street Scene” Oil on Canvas 12 x 16 inches.

Frederick Arthur Bridgman was born in Alabama but came from a family with Northern roots which prompted the family back to Boston. The young Bridgman enrolled in art school in Brooklyn and showed formidable talent at the yearly exhibitions.

He felt the call of Europe early on and in 1866 he set off for France. Bridgman arrived in Paris in 1866, entering the studio of Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After a trip to Algeria and Egypt in 1872 he turned his attention to North African subjects, emulating his master’s precise and colorful manner.

Throughout his career, Bridgman’s primary concern was to depict the contemporary life of the natives and delve into their customs. He befriended many North Africans during the years he visited their countries and he became America’s preeminent Orientalist painter.

 “Woman in Carriage” Oil on Canvas. 38 x 28 inches.

Silvestro Lega (8 December 1826 – 21 September 1895) was an Italian realist painter. He was one of the leading artists of the Macchiaioli and was also involved with the Mazzini movement.

He was born in Modigliana, near Forlì, to an affluent family. From 1838 he attended the Piarist College, where his skill at drawing became evident. From 1843 to 1847 he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, studying drawing under Benedetto Servolini (1805–79) and Tommaso Gazzarrini (1790–1853), then studying painting, briefly, under Giuseppe Bezzuoli. During 1847 he attended Luigi Mussini’s school, where the teaching emphasized the 15th-century Florentine principles of drawing and orderly construction. Then and for some years afterwards he continued to attend the Scuola del Nudo of the Accademia.

As a Garibaldian volunteer, Lega participated in the military campaigns for Italian independence (1848–49) before resuming his training, this time under Antonio Ciseri. In 1850 he completed his first large-scale painting, Doubting Thomas (Modigliana, Osp. Civ.). In 1852 he won the Concorso Trienniale dell’Accademia with David Placating Saul. On 30 January 1853, he became a member of the Accademia degli Incamminati of Modigliana. In 1855, Lega returned to his native town, where he remained until 1857.

Serious by nature, Lega was an infrequent visitor of the Caffè Michelangiolo, a favorite meeting place in the 1850s for the young painters who later became known as the Macchiaioli. Diego Martelli, a contemporary of Lega, wrote of him that “he was not one of those people who, artistically speaking, can fling themselves into novel developments …. In spite of the discussions that went on nightly in the crucible of the Caffè Michelangiolo, Lega’s art, until 1859, remained conspicuously academic.” Subsequently, Lega’s style began moving towards Realism and away from the Purismo of Mussini. This progress is evident in the four lunettes he painted between 1858 and 1863 for the Oratory of the Madonna del Cantone in Modigliana, and in several military-themed works he painted during that period. Together with his Macchiaioli friends Odoardo Borrani, Giuseppe Abbati, Telemaco Signorini and Raffaello Sernesi, he started painting landscapes en plein air.

From 1861 to 1870, he lived with the Batelli family, near the Affrico river, and started a relationship with the elder daughter, Virginia. The children and women of the Batelli family were the subjects of many of his paintings during this happy period of his life.

In 1870, he was awarded the silver medal at the Parma’s National Exposition. In that same year, Virginia Batelli, his companion, died of tuberculosis. Three of Lega’s brothers also died at about this time. The grieving Lega returned to Modigliana. Depressed, and experiencing the onset of eye problems, he ceased painting almost entirely for four years between 1874 and 1878. In 1875, he and Borrani established a modern art gallery in Florence, but it quickly failed, and Lega’s financial problems worsened. In 1878 he took part in the preparation of the Parigi’s Universal Exposition. At the Florentine Promotrice in 1879, Lega—who never traveled outside Italy—saw two Impressionist paintings by Camille Pissarro, which he admired.

He became a frequent guest of the Tommasi family, and a tutor of the sons of the family. The art historian Norma Broude says that “like the Batellis before them, [the Tommasis] welcomed Lega into their family circle and provided for him the warm and close-knit family environment in which he and his art could flourish.” In 1886, he painted one of his most famous works, the Gabbarigiane.

By the mid-1880s, Lega was almost blind, and perceived only large masses. He produced many paintings in Gabbro, where he was a guest of the Bandini family. He participated at the Exposition Universelle (1889) and at the Promotrice of Florence.

Lega died in Florence in 1895 of stomach cancer.

“The Assumption of the Virgin” 30 1/4 x 20, Oil on Canvas

Balthasar Beschey (Dutch, 1708 – 1776) was born Antwerp in 1708, studied under Pieter Strick, an unimportant painter, but imitated the styles of Van Balen and of De Craeyer. In 1753 he was admitted as a freeman of the Guild of St. Luke, and two years later became one of the six directors of the Academy in the above town, and in the year following that was elected dean of St. Luke. He died in 1776, at Antwerp, while holding the post of professor in the Academy of that city.

He painted landscapes at the commencement of his artistic career, but confined himself in after life to sacred history and portraiture. In the two latter branches of art he is well represented. His works display a taste for harmony, and are for the most part carefully executed, but are wanting in delicacy of coloring.

Jose Frappa (French, 1854-1904) “The Cardinal’s Birthday” Oil on Panel. 36.25 x 44.5 inches.

Jose Frappa spent his childhood in the town of St-Etienne, about 20 miles southwest of Lyon, France. Born on April 18, 1854 to Rose and Jean-Claude Frappa, he grew up during the relatively stable Second Empire period when France was perceived as both a political and cultural leader in Europe. The family grocery store was apparently at the center of daily life in St. Etienne, and Frappa seems to be fondly remembered there even now.

The young Frappa showed an interest—and talent—in the visual arts from the time he was quite young. Building on this interest, his parents apprenticed him as a designer in silk trade in Lyon. However, Frappa soon determined that his interest was primarily in the art of painting, rather than textile design. His parents were less than enthusiastic about this development, but eventually agreed that he should attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.

Frappa enrolled at the art school in 1872 when he was eighteen years old, the year after France’s resounding defeat at the hands of the Prussian army. Fortunately for the city of Lyon, the Prussian advance on Paris and Versailles was sufficient to end the war before hostilities spread further south. Despite the gravity of France’s occupation by Prussian forces, Lyon remained a thriving industrial center in the late nineteenth century; more significant for Frappa, it offered him an exciting introduction to metropolitan life.

Frappa decided to pursue his passion for painting and moved to the big city of Paris to study at the national Ecole des Beaux-Arts. According to an 1890 source, Frappa studied first with Isadore Pils (1813-1875), and then with Charles Comte (1823-1895) and Jehan-Georges Vibert (1840-1902) after Pils’ death in 1875. [i] Both Comte and Vibert specialized in anecdotal genre paintings, which were very popular during the early years of the Third Republic.

Frappa’s painting, The Flautist, which is dated 1875, reflects the influence of his professors in this genre. It not only demonstrates the young artist’s competence in drawing and composition, but also provides a glimpse of the type of subject that will come to characterize much of his work. The painting is clearly an image of a model posing as a flautist in a staged setting, which may even have been intended as a reference to Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute. It is light-hearted and just intriguing enough to draw the viewer into imagining a narrative to fit the scene. Frappa will continue to refine this approach over the years as he explored a variety of anecdotal genre subjects ranging from scenes of monks and cardinals of the Catholic church to rococo-revival lovers’ trysts.

When Frappa made his Salon debut in 1876, anecdotal genre painting was amply displayed and widely appreciated by the public. According to Emile Zola’s review of the Salon that year, viewers stood in line to see The Flower Market by Marie-François Firmin-Girard (1838-1921), a charming depiction of beautiful women among the flower sellers next to the Seine. More influential for Frappa, however, was The Cardinal’s Antechamber, a painting by Vibert, in which a red-robed cardinal addresses a lovely young woman seated in an opulent setting. Vibert was well known for this type of image, and undoubtedly mentored Frappa as he began to define his own artistic path. Four years later, he won an honorable mention at the 1880 Salon, no small achievement among a field of 7,289 entries, the largest number ever at the Paris Salon.

In his personal life, Frappa was also thriving. He married Madeleine Marie Augustine Frézet in 1881 and set up housekeeping with her in the 17th arrondissement on the northwest side of Paris. On April 3, 1881, their only son, Jean José Frappa was born. It was during these years that Frappa seems to have begun to develop his reputation as a portrait painter. The earliest securely dated portrait is from 1884 and shows a beautiful young woman in a sumptuously lace-trimmed gown. Known only as Portrait d’élégante, she was clearly a woman of style and presumably wealth. With a new family to support, Frappa undoubtedly realized that portrait painting could provide a reliable income if he was successful at it.

During the 1880s, he also began exhibiting his work in both London and the United States, expanding the market for his paintings beyond the borders of France. He held an exhibition in London in June 1887 and appears to have continued this practice well into the 1890s. Frappa was particularly active in the American art market, with representation through galleries in New York City. Although his work was probably quite widely appreciated in the United States, it is securely documented in the collection of William H. Shaw and in the catalogue of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco. By 1888, Frappa was sufficiently affluent to move his family into new quarters at 12, rue de Pergolèse in the decidedly fashionable 16th arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne.

Frappa’s prosperity depended in part on his ability to work in a variety of genres ranging from traditional portraiture and realistic narratives depicting serious subjects to the amusing anecdotal scenes of religious figures, particularly cardinals and monks engaged in all too human foibles of enjoying a glass of wine or playing popular card games.

Public acclaim for Frappa’s work increased considerably in the late 1880s and 1890s. He was twice a member of the Conseil des 90 de la Société des Artistes Français, a private council that today might be called an executive committee; and an associate member of the newly created Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts led by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In 1890, he began exhibiting at the Salon du Champ de Mars that was associated with the Société. During this decade, Frappa was also exploring the world of publishing, both as an illustrator and as an author. His illustration entitled Fleur et Papillon was included in the limited edition publication of Chansons et Poesies de Camille Roy in 1898; and simultaneously, he was working on a book of his own on the subject of expression in the human face. Published by the Librairie générale des art décoratifs in 1902, Frappa’s book, Les expressions de la physionomie humaine, became a seminal book for analyzing how human beings could (or could not) control their facial expressions. This type of scientific inquiry was typical of the post-Darwinian world in which both artists and scientists sought to understand how humans fit into the scheme of biological development.

In 1897, Frappa was represented in the Exposition Internationale in Brussels with two paintings, Le dispensaire d’enfants (The Children’s Clinic) and La femme au manteau bleu (The Woman in the Blue Cloak) and was awarded the Legion of Honor medal on February 4, 1898, in large part because of his work on the exposition.

After such a remarkable career, beginning in the family grocery story in St. Etienne and ultimately becoming a respected and successful painter in Paris, Frappa’s life ended rather early at age 50 in 1904. He did not live to see his son become a well-known author, playwright and editor of Le Monde Illustré. Frappa is buried not far from his home in the Boulogne-Billancourt cemetery. In his hometown of St. Etienne, he was honored with a large monument in front of the town hall. Sculpted by Georges Bareau, the dedication ceremony on Mary 17, 1912 was attended by the national minister of fine arts as well as the mayor of St. Etienne and of course, Frappa’s widow, son and mother.

Francesc Sans Castaño (Spanish, 1868 – 1937) “Sabio”. Oil on Canvas. 24 x 31.5 inches.

Francisco (or Francesc) Sans Castaño was a Spanish painter and engraver.

Born in Barcelona, he studied at the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona. He collaborated at the Hojas Selectas magazine. He was a member of the Barcelona’s Circle of Fine Arts, a dissident organization of the Artistic Circle.

He took part in the 1882, 1887, 1890, 1899 and 1910 National Exhibitions (winning an honorary mention in that of 1887) and in the 1911 World’s Fair, winning a third-class medal.

Marie Adelaide Kindt (Belgian, 1804-1893). “The Music Lesson”. Oil on Canvas. 37 X 44 inches.

Adèle Kindt was a Belgian painter; known primarily for portraits and genre scenes.

Born in Brussels into a family that produced many female artists, Marie-Adélaïde Kindt was trained in drawing by engraver Antoine Cardon. She studied painting under Sophie Rude and François-Joseph Navez and was encouraged by Jacques-Louis David.

Although trained as a neoclassicist, Kindt produced work informed by Romanticism. Her early works included many historical scenes. Her Épisode des journées de septembre 1830, portraying a scene from the Belgian Revolution of 1830, is considered her masterpiece and is on display in the Brussels city museum on the Grand Place.

After the 1840s, Kindt painted much less ambitious works, largely portraiture and genre scenes. Although she adapted her style to suit the changing tastes of the public, she never recaptured the success of her early career. She died in Brussels. Her date of death is usually said to have been in 1884, but this has also been described as a “stubborn error” that should be corrected to 8 May 1893. Her death was reported in the newspaper Le Patriote on 12 May 1893, in coverage of registrations of births, deaths and marriages in the city of Brussels.

Her younger sisters Clara and Laurence were landscape painters, as was her sister-in-law Isabelle Kindt-Van Assche.

Paul Hermann Wagner (German, 1852 – 1937). “Mother & Child”. Oil on Canvas. 39.5 X 28 inches.

Paul Wagner was a landscape and figure painter who was born in Rothenburg on the 1st January 1852. He studied in Munich in 1875 with Ludwig Von Lofftz. He also studied with Wilhelm Von Lindenschmit and in 1884 studied under Albert Schmidt in Schafflerstrae. He is known for his superb technique and brushwork in his figures of Nymphs, Fairies and also his landscape paintings.

Unknown Artist. :Having a Drink”. 19th/20th Century. Oil on Canvas. 23.5 X 35.5 inches.

Illegible signature bottom right of canvas.

Frans Wilhelm Odelmark (Swedish, 1849 – 1937) “Arab figures in a Cairo” Oil on Canvas. 35.5 X 21.5 inches.

Frans Wilhelm Odelmark was a Swedish artist noted for his genre paintings and Orientalist themes.

He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm and after that in Düsseldorf and in Munich. He painted people in everyday live and picturesque architectural subjects, mainly with subjects from Europe and the Orient, staying in Egypt for an extended period and where he made many colorful paintings of Cairo. He executed works in watercolor, pastel and oil.