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Charles Volkmar, American 1841-1914 browse these categories for related items... All Items: Fine Art:Paintings:Oil:N. America:American: Pre 1900: item # 1022128
SUSQUEHANNA Antique Company, Inc. 3216 O Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20007 (202)333-1511 Guest Book $3500 |
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| Oil on canvas, 16" x 30" signed lower left and dated 70 (1870)bio from ask art.com CHARLES VOLKMAR (1841-1914) Born in Baltimore, Maryland to a family steeped in the arts (his grandfather was an engraver; his father, a Dresden-educated portrait painter, etcher and restorer),it was natural for Volkmar to pursue artistic training. Having received his initial art education at the Maryland Institute, he was an accomplished etcher by his late teens. In 1861, an intriguingly unrecorded incident resulted in his accusation as a Confederate sympathizer and Volkmar made a speedy departure for Europe (Clark, p. 1). Settling in Paris, he studied under the bronze sculptor Antoine-Louis Bayre at the Jarden des Plantes and in the government schools. Volkmar remained in France for nearly fifteen years, making frequent trips to the United States, “partly for the purpose of voting for the second term of Lincoln, getting married, and other commendable enterprises” (Walton, p. LXXV). During his first visit in 1864, he exhibited a landscape entitled Gorges Creek, Va. at the National Academy of Design in New York; on his next trip in 1867, he married his wife Nettie. Volkmar returned to Europe and took up studies with Henri Harpignies, the Barbizon landscapist. He made his first appearance at the Paris Salon in 1875 and thereafter became a regular exhibitor of paintings, etchings and pottery. Volkmar was once again in the United States to visit the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where he exhibited one of his landscapes and saw, for the first time, a French pottery decorated with an underglaze “slip.” Fascinated by this technique, Volkmar relocated to Montigney-sur-Loring, near Fontainbleau, to observe the potters employing the method first-hand. There were at that time a number of other artists, all of them later celebrated, who painted for the potters before glazing: Harpignes, Cazin, Troyon, Diaz, Anker, Colturièr and, most notably, Eugene Carrière. Carrière invited Volkmar to set up a kiln in partnership with him. Instead, Volkmar worked with the faiencier Theodore Deck in Paris and there learned the procèss barbotine underglaze slip painting technique. Volkmar returned to the United States and set up kilns at Greenpoint, Long Island in 1879; Tremont (the Bronx), New York in 1882; Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1888; and Metuchen, New Jersey in 1902. His son, Leon Volkmar, joined him in 1903 in a partnership that flourished until 1911 when ill health forced him to dissolve the business. Volkmar died three years later in 1914. Volkmar exhibited landscapes and animal pictures at the National Academy of Design from 1864 until 1894; at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Annual, 1877, 1883; at the Boston Art Club, 1881, 1884, 1892-94; at the Brooklyn Art Association, 1883, 1885; and at the American Watercolor Society, 1898. For his pottery, as for his easel paintings, etchings and watercolors, Volkmar’s preferred decorative motif was a landscape with water and some living creature, often a duck, goose or cow. Writing about the artist in 1909, William Walton observed: “His studies of ducks, both wild and tame, in full flight like the feathered bullets they are, or placidly paddling and floating in the domestic pond, have been so numerous, so varied and so truthful that to many he is known chiefly as a painter of these fowl, in all his three arts (Walton, p. LXXX). References: Clark, Garth and Marjorie Hughto. "A Century of Ceramics in The United States, 1878-1978". New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979. Clark, John B. "The Volkmar Legacy to American Pottery". Greenwich, Connecticut: The Bruce Museum, 1985. Falk, Peter Hastings. "Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975", vol. III. New York: Sound View Press, 1999. | ||
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