Dale Nichols
RACING HOME
Oil on canvas
25 x 30 inches
Available at Surovek Gallery
This is a time of year often brings up feelings of nostalgia for the places that inspire tender and sentimental memories.
The works of Dale Nichols (1904-1995) were often inspired by his feelings of longing for home. Nichols traveled extensively during his lifetime. He studied, lived and worked in Chicago, and became an art editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet, as widely as Nichols traveled, most of his works featured the red barn of his childhood farm in Nebraska.
His works resonated with so many Americans that the images he created were put on plates, trays, cards, tins and even on postcards sold by the United States Postal Service in 1995.
Like Nichols, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was a Regionalist painter. He left his home town of Neosho, Missouri to pursue his career in art. Benton studied in Paris, spent more than twenty years living and working in New York and ultimately returned to Missouri to focus on paintings of the American midwest.
Thomas Hart Benton’s Home and Studio in Kansas City, Missouri is a State Historic Site and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Benton also painted serene studies of Martha’s Vineyard where his family spent nearly every summer from 1920 until his death in 1975.
Anthony Thieme (1888-1954) was born in Rotterdam, studied art at he Academie of Fine Arts in Rotterdam and at the Royal Academy, the Hague. He did a lot of traveling in Europe before marrying and settling down in Rockport, Massachusetts. Thieme played a large role in the Rockport School of American Regional Art. Beginning in the 1940s, he spent summers in Rockport and winters in St. Augustine, Florida.
Thieme painted landscapes and seascapes en plein air. His ability to capture the atmosphere of his subjects was so skillful, that many in the art world referred to Thieme as the Master of Light and Shadow.
Home is not just a place … it can also be a feeling of peace and serenity, that great artists can help us experience, when we long for home.
References:
Henry Adams. Go Behind the Red Barn and Rediscover Dale Nichols. Smithsonian Magazine. January 26, 2012.
Paul Theroux. The Story Behind Thomas Hart Benton’s Incredible Masterwork. Smithsonian Magazine. December 2014.
Jerome Myers. Artist in Manhattan. New York: American Artists Group. 1940.
