1869-1952 was an American painter. Gray was born into a San Francisco family endowed with a broad literary and artistic background. He studied under Arthur Frank Mathews at the San Francisco School of Design and later under William Merritt Chase. While he had some early Impressionistic tendencies, his primary expression was under the Tonalism Mathews had brought back from Paris. He is known for his extraction of beauty from the Northern California landscape. Alexander Gray, Percy's father, was born in England, but found his way to a successful insurance business in San Francisco. As the byproduct of a childhood illness, Percy realized he had talents in art. From 1886 to 1888 he attended the California School of Design, then led by Mathews. From there he went on to become a newspaper illustrator, obtaining a job with the New York Journal. In New York he also studied at the Art Students League. He was dispatched from New York to cover the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but decided to remain in his native city where he would then take up his painting career. Gray's first pieces, headland seascapes, were exhibited in 1907; soon thereafter he addressed in watercolor eucalyptus groves and fields of California wildflowers. These subjects would become signatures of his work. Originally Gray's works were oils; however, he eventually developed an allergy to oil paints, and therefore switched to using watercolors as his primary medium. [1] From early on the critics marvelled at his ability to infuse realistic depictions of nature with a mystical and poetic quality. He was clearly applying the precepts of his mentor William Merritt Chase in exaggeration of light and color. From 1912 to 1923 Gray lived in Burlingame, California about twenty miles south of San Francisco, while keeping his studio in the city itself. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition he won a bronze medal for his watercolor Out of the Desert, Oregon. Having been a bachelor for 53 years, Gray surprised his friends by marrying. He and his bride moved to the Bonificio Adobe in Monterey, where seascapes and cypress dominated his later works.   Related Paintings of Percy Gray :. | Corral de Tierra (mk42) | White Swan (mk42) | The Artist's Niece Katherine Murch Whitton (mk42) | San Mateo Oaks (mk42) | Pines and Sand Dunes (mk42) |
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Rene-Antoine Houasse
(c. 1645 - 1710) was a decorative French painter. He was a pupil of Charles Le Brun, under whose direction he worked at the Manufacture des Gobelins, and with whom he worked on the decoration of the Château de Versailles. He was the director of the French Academy in Rome from 1699 to 1704. His son was Michel-Ange Houasse, a painter of genre scenes.
John French Sloan
(August 2, 1871 - September 7, 1951) was a U.S. artist. As a member of The Eight, a group of American artists, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century",and an "early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs."
Karl Nordstrom
Swedish Painter, 1855-1923 was a Swedish painter and one of the leading members of Konstnärsförbundet, which he chaired from 1896 until its dissolution in 1920. Born on Gotland, but growing up on Tjörn on the Swedish West Coast, Nordström studied at principskolan, the preparatory school of the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm and the private painting school of Edvard Perseus, but was never promoted to the "Antique school" of the Academy but had to continue on his own. Traveling to Paris in 1881, he was influenced by the impressionists. He spent a couple of years in Grez-sur-Loing, the site of an important colony of Scandinavian artists, practising his plein air painting in the strong French sunlight. In 1885, he joined the group of young artists protesting against the policies and leadership of the Academy, and he was ever since 1886 one of the leading members of Konstnärsförbundet, the formalization of the opposition group. He was its chairman from 1896 until its dissolution in 1920. In 1886, he married xylographer and photographer Tekla Lindeström in Paris. Later the same year, he settled on Tjörn, using what he had learnt in France about light and colours to depict the landscape where he had grown up. He spent the summer of 1889 in Visby. Around 1890, he moved from his earlier impressionism towards a more synthetist style. His influences came from Japanese art, which he had encountered in Paris, and from Gauguin, whose paintings he first saw in photographs he had received from Ivan Agueli. One of Nordström's old friends from the time at the Academy and in Perseus' school, Nils Kreuger, had lived in the city of Varberg since 1888. He convinced Nordström to move there in 1892, and they were joined by another of their old friends, Richard Bergh, in 1893.