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 :. | Indian Maiden (mk42) | The Gypsy Girl (mk42) | Pastoral Eucalyptus (mk42) | Trees on a Hillside (mk42) | California Landscape |
Related Artists:
Leonhard Beck
German Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1480-1542, Illuminator, painter, draughtsman and woodcutter, son of Georg Beck. He first appears as an illuminator and collaborator with his father in two Psalters for the Augsburg monastery of SS Ulrich and Afra in 1495, producing 35 coloured initial letters for each of them (Augsburg, Staats- & Stadtbib., Cod. 49a). These are vigorously coloured but fairly uniform in character, with small, lively biblical scenes excellently adapted to the letters. Red, green and blue predominate; ochre tones provide a link with the gold ground. The initial letter X is composed of splendidly curled, entwining foliage with birds and half-figures of prophets; the Virgin, Joseph, the Christ Child in the manger and the choir of angels are each enclosed in one of its sectors. The figures are presented in a light, easy manner; the draughtsmanship avoids unnecessary detail.
Paulus Bor
(Amersfoort, c. 1601 - Amersfoort, 10 August 1669) was a Dutch painter. Bor was descended from a notable Catholic family. He made a study trip to Rome, where he was one of the founders of the Bentvueghels, taking the nickname Orlando. He returned in 1626 to Amersfoort and joined Jacob van Campen in the decoration of the palace Honselaarsdijk belonging to Frederik Hendrik. In 1656, he became regent of the godshuis "De Armen de Poth" in Amersfoort. Bor's style of painting was rather at odds with that of contemporary painters from Utrecht. He initially painted rather Caravaggisti-like history paintings, but his works fast became marked by a classicism related to that of his townsman van Campen. Through unusual compositions and primitive technique, his paintings depict strange and mysterious subjects.
William Morris Hunt
1824- 1879 William Morris Hunt Gallery Hunt's father's family were among Vermont's founders and largest landowners; his mother's a family of wealth and prominence in Connecticut. Hunt attended Harvard but withdrew in his junior year. Following the untimely death of his Congressman father from cholera, Hunt's mother Jane took him and his brothers to Switzerland, the South of France and to Rome, where Hunt studied with Couture in Paris and then came under the influence of Jean-François Millet, from whom he learned the principles of the Barbizon school. The Hunt family remained in Europe for a dozen years. Afterwards, leaving Paris, he painted and established art schools at Newport, Rhode Island, where he had relatives, Brattleboro, Vermont, Faial Island in the Azores, where he had family connections and finally at Boston, where he painted, taught art and became a popular portrait painter. The companionship of Millet had a lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, and his work grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was among the biggest proponents of the Barbizon school in America, and he more than any other turned the rising generation of American painters towards Paris. On his return in 1855 he painted some of his most handsome canvases, all reminiscent of his life in France and of Millet's influence. Such are The Belated Kid, Girl at the Fountain, Hurdy-Gurdy Boy, and others ?C but the public called for portraits, and it became the fashion to sit for Hunt; among his best paintings of this genre are those of William M. Evarts, Mrs Charles Francis Adams, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, William H. Gardner, Chief Justice Shaw and Judge Horace Gray. Sadly, many of Hunt's paintings and sketches, together with five large Millets and other art treasures collected by him in Europe, were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.