AFA 22nd Anniversary

Antiques & Fine Art 91 2022 William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), Dancing on the Barn Floor, 1831. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook, NY; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville. Writers on the Beach (Harrison and Ayers Denne, 2002), Long Island Landscape Painting, Vols. I & II ( Pisano, 1985, 1990), this will be the first published volume to provide succinct and easy reference information on the broad and sometimes surprising range of artists who have lived, worked, and found inspiration across the entire region, from Brooklyn to Montauk. Due to its proximity to New York City and its singular coastal beauty spread over 120 miles, the region has long attracted painters, sculptors, and printmakers. According to Baker, “the first foray of an organized group of artists to Long Island was composed of members of the Tile Club (a group which included Augustus Saint-Gaudens, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Edwin Austin Abbey, and more), who undertook three summer excursions: to East Hampton in 1878, Sands Point in 1880, and Port Jefferson in 1881.” However, well before this, artists, both home-grown figures such as the genre painter William Sidney Mount and visiting luminaries, were drawn to the region. After the arrival of regular steamboat service to Long Island’s North Shore in the 1820s and the opening of the Long Island Railroad in 1844, possibilities exploded for travel eastward to quaint seafaring villages and the bucolic surrounding countryside. While a surprising list of well-known artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are included in this checklist––Frederic Edwin Church, George Bellows, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others ––there are legions of lesser- known individuals who, nonetheless, received outstanding training at schools like the National Academy of Design; the