Bramblefind

Hi - hoping I might be able to get more info on this artist and/or the location/type of buildings depicted in this painting. I have found another painting by this same artist listed here:

http://www.aspireauctions.com/auctio...ils/19083.html

which I was able to identify as a scene from the California Diamond Jubilee World's Fair in San Francisco 1925.

I posted this painting on the Treasurenet.com forum and some guesses have ranged from an internment camp, farm buildings, army camp etc...

Any help very much appreciated

John

I'm being called away but I wanted to mention that I found a landscape by HL Engle -- mentioned in the treasurenet thread you mentioned -- and the signature was quite different. That's not definitive, as there's no requirement for an artist to sign ever work the exact same way, but it's suggestive.

Bramblefind

Thank you John HL Engle did have me going for a bit. I also found a brief bio of him that mentioned he was in California and I've been meaning to check into that further on the off chance he was having a watercolor phase at the time. I doubt it is him though.

This painting needs re-matting and framing. I think I will have that done and maybe there will be some sort of clue behind the backing...

Hercules Brabazon

It's a bit of a wild guess but....have you tried Amos W Engle?

He seems to have been a vaguely modernist watercolourist - he exhibited at the Armory Show - and a description of one of his works in a New York Times review sounds like it's describing a work rather like one on the Aspire site.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...D9415B858DF1D3

But I can't find anything definitively attributed to him.

Edit:this is interesting. On pp. 20-21 of this biography of his friend David B Milne, it says that none of Amos W. Engle's works are known (!), but makes suggestions about possible influences.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=o...sec=frontcover

on p129 it says he "frittered his life away as a prospector on the West Coast."

John

None of his works are known? That's very exciting, although I guess it would make it hard to authenticate them unless you got very very lucky.

His works do have a definite Modernist look to them, especially the city view in the auction link above. Reminds me of Charles Demuth or Joseph Stella.

John

P.S. Here's another contemporary newspaper article with a description of a hard-edged "jerky" watercolor portrait.

http://fultonhistory.com/Newspapers%207/New%20York%20NY%20Times/New%20York%20NY%20Times%201916%20Nov%201-15%20Grayscale/New%20York%20NY%20Times%201916%20Nov%201-15%20Grayscale%20%28159%29.pdf

Bramblefind

This is fantastic! Thank you so much for this lead!

I saw in the Milne bio that Engle worked at the "Lucky Jim Silver Mine" in California. I was digging and found that mine listed in Inyo County. I've just started looking for some scenic images of that area - since maybe my painting is of a mining operation (that was one of the ideas on Treasurenet). This picture caught my eye though - associated with the "Lucky Strike Mine" in Inyo County:

http://usa.indettaglio.it/eng/06/027/227825.html

John

Here's a link to a NY Times search that brings up a total of about 6 old articles mentioning Amos Engle. The article on "industrial art" intriguingly mentions a painting of "a village on the side of a hill" (column 3). The article is dated 1918, so if the date on the painting is authentic then it must be a different painting.

http://query.nytimes.com/search/site...&more=date_all

Bramblefind

I'm definitely going to re-read all the links here and I have some newspaper access sites I belong to so I am going to do more research on my own.

The more I find the more it looks promising this painting could be an Amos W. Engle work. I know very little about the art world so any advice, thoughts, ideas... on how to proceed with this painting would be welcomed.

I'm happy I posted here

John

It would be really cool to make a discovery like this, but keep in mind that even if you do manage to demonstrate that the artist is Amos Engle, the watercolor still might not be worth much.

For example, in my (small) art collection I have a painting by Hardesty Maratta, a turn-of-the-century painter who developed his own theory of color mixing and whose followers included a couple of members of the Ashcan School (in other words, quite famous American artists). It's kind of neat to own a piece of history like this, but in the end the painting is probably only worth a few hundred bucks.

Bramblefind

Thanks John and really I am very much interested in the discovery. And maybe getting some of Amos Engle's works on record b/c I do think he deserves that.

AND....I have some new info and I do now think it is him who is the artist of my painting. This painting came to me from my Mother. She could not at first remember where she got it but as I did newspaper research I discovered that Amos W. Engle was married - likely just a year or two before he died in 1926.

His wife had family connections to my area of NY. I even found a newspaper mention of her visiting her sister and brother in law and gave an address. When I mentioned that info to my Mom it all came back her that she had arranged an estate sale at that home. She even gave me a clock with the name of Amos W. Engle's brother in law engraved on it!

Big Thanks to Hercules too Really appreciate you locating those references!

Bramblefind

Wanted you to know that I sent an email to David Silcox, author of the Milne bio and now President of Sotheby's Canada with a link to this thread and asked if he would take a look at the painting and give his opinion if it was a work of Amos W. Engle. I also thought he might be interested in seeing it.

Well he was very interested in seeing it and sent me back a very nice email. Though he has never seen a work of Engle's he thought this painting was one of his. He also was very complimentary to the painting (called it "quite a lovely work" and "meticulous, imaginative, and technically much more than just competent") and said Engle was "obviously a remarkable person and who died far too young".

So I am very pleased .... I am going to get it reframed. I'm hoping there might be a title behind it.

Hercules Brabazon

How amazing for everything to fit together so neatly, and how rare it must be for such a "lost" artist had so much biography available.....