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Robert D. Wilkie. The Kelp Gatherers, Gloucester. browse these categories for related items... All Items: Fine Art:Paintings:Oil:N. America:American: Pre 1900: item # 699688 Please refer to our stock # 2467 when inquiring.
Raymond Agler Fine Arts 16 Pleasant Street Gloucester, Massachusetts 01930 978-281-5048 Guest Book Price on request |
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| Robert David Wilkie (1828-1903), "The Kelp Gatherers on the Beach at Gloucester, Mass.". Oil on canvas, 17 x 41 inches (sight), 25 x 49 inches with frame, signed "R. D. Wilkie" lower right, inscribed with title in pencil on stretcher. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Wilkie was earning a living as an artist by his early twenties. By 1853 he was in the Boston area, producing illustrations for "Gleason's Pictorial" and "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly", following in the path of Fitz Henry Lane who had produced lithographs for Frank Pendleton in Boston 20 years earlier. In 1856, he is recorded as exhibiting 2 paintings at the Boston Athenaeum. By 1868 he was working for the famous Boston chromolithographer, Louis Prang, producing images of American life while he pursued a second career as a teacher. He nonetheless found time to go on painting excursions to the White Mountains, the Adirondacks and the shores of Cape Ann. He died at the home of his son in Swampscott, Massachusetts in 1903, largely forgotten. Vose Galleries of Boston reawakened interest in Wilkie with a major exhibition of his work in 1948. Today his work rarely comes on the market. This major work, with its dramatic, complex light effects and its nostalgic subject matter, bears comparison with the work of Fitz Henry Lane and Eastman Johnson, who successfully mined the same artistic vein. The painting is from the estate of one of Cape Ann's most prominent collectors. Condition is excellent and it apparently retains its original frame. | ||
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