(7) VOLS., PHOTOGRAPHY AND
(7) VOLS., PHOTOGRAPHY AND PHOTOGRAPHERS Includes: 1) Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography, Yale, 1992; 2) The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978. Nat'l Gallery of Art/Princeton, 2007; 3) The Aesthetics of French Photography. The Sources of Modern Photography, Arno Press, 1979; 4) Julia Margaret Cameron's Women. Yale, 1998 (paperback); 5) The Pencil of Nature: William Henry Fox Talbot. Da Capo, 1969; 6) Edward Steichen The Early Years. Princeton/Met. Museum of Art, 1999; 7) Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz. Met. Museum of Art, 1978, 1st ed, in slipcase; largest: 14.5"h x 11"w
RACHEL V. HARTLEY, NEW YORK
RACHEL V. HARTLEY, NEW YORK (1884-1955), UNTITLED, 1932, OIL ON BOARD, 19 1/2"H X 23 1/4"W (SIGHT), 28"H X 31"W (FRAME).Rachel V. Hartley, New York, (1884-1955) untitled, 1932, oil on board Signed and dated lower right. Exhibited: PPOW Gallery, NY Biography from the Archives of askART: Born into a family of artists in New York City on January 4, 1884, Rachel Hartley was the daughter of sculptor Jonathon Scott Hartley and Helen Inness Hartley. Her grandfather was George Inness, one of America's greatest 19th century painters. She was raised in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated in private schools there. At age 17, and with a letter of recommendation from her famous grandfather, Miss Hartley entered the Art Students League in New York City as a special student. After her studies at the League were over, she worked in a studio next to her father's and devoted herself to portraits. In 1916, she was invited to accompany her botanist brother on the first William Beebe expedition to South America. Hartley was the official artist on the expedition organized by the American Museum of Natural History. The team spent six months at the Tropical Research Station of the New York Zoological Society in British Guiana. During the trip, Hartley perfected a loose representational style and developed a keen interest in the pure landscape expressed through natural colors and dramatic use of light. An important untitled Florida painting of a large and impressive tree that dominates a riverine landscape, now in the Percy-Geiger Collection in Tallahassee, Florida, is representative of this phase in her career. Here, Hartley also reflects the influence of the independent movement in American art led by Robert Henri and John Sloan but in a Florida-based landscape with possible religious reference to the Tree in the Garden of Eden. This painting hovers between 19th century academic painting and the work of the 20th century Realists. Rachel Hartley often said that her "artistic career really began on a train bound for Tarpon Springs, Florida, with her grandparents," who maintained a vacation home there. Florida was to play an important role in the life of this suffragette artist throughout her long and prolific career. Hartley maintained residences in New York City and Southampton, Long Island. Typically, she spent summers partly in Southampton and partly in Provincetown, Gloucester, or elsewhere in New England. She also spent part of the year painting in Florida and other southern states, especially Virginia and the Carolinas. She exhibited her popular works, including Florida-themed works, principally in the Northeast in Boston and New York, including exhibitions at the Ainslie and MacBeth Galleries. Her paintings are included in many North and South American collections, including the National Gallery in Georgetown, British Guiana, and the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, Florida. Hartley is included in a number of standard reference works including Modernism in the South, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism Transformations 1885-1945, the Dictionary of American Artists, and Reflections II :Watercolors of Florida 1835 – 2000. Hartley's important "Peacock paintings" are based on a well-known farm located at the southeast corner of Haines Road or U.S. 19 and Gulf to Bay Boulevard in Clearwater, Florida. The Seville Farm produced peacocks that eventually inundated the area of Greenbriar in north Clearwater where this farm was founded and run by African-American farmers in the 1920s who collected the peacock feathers to sell for use in the fashion industry. The Great Depression signaled the end of the Seville Farm and the fowl were released into the area. Over the years many of the peafowl have been trapped and relocated, yet many still roam the area today. In the painting represented here, Hartley unites the African-American farmers with their fowl. She presents a marginal location and cultural moment previously ignored as inappropriate for the subject of a painting until the revolution prompted by the so-called Ashcan Group of painters at the Art Students League prior to the Armory Show of 1913 where a new style of relaxed realism and personal expression was formally introduced to contemporary American art. In doing so, she creates a canvas of visual interest in her characteristic style of relaxed realism and local color, as she captures a bit of Black ethnic life and history which was a subject of great interest to northern artists and thinkers working in the South because of the exotic and symbol-laden peacock with its rich associations of sainthood, vice, and the mysteries of the East. Excerpt from essay submitted to askART titled Out of the Shadows: Women and the Florida School of Art, by Gary R. Libby, Art Historian and author of book Reflections II: Watercolors of Florida 1835-2000. oil on board Dimensions: 19 1/2"H x 23 1/4"w (sight), 28"H x 31"W (frame).