Bringing up the Guns, oil on canvas,
unsigned, 23.5" x 35.5" sight, 32" x
44" frame.
About the Painting: Very good condition; re-lined.
About the Artist: Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Gilbert
Gaul became a painter of highly realistic
western scenes showing interaction between
Caucasian people and Indians.
He attended schools in Newark,
New Jersey
and the Claverack Military Academy,
but ill
health prevented him from pursuing
a naval
career. In the 1870s, he began
the study
of art, enrolling in New York
at the National
Academy of Design where he studied
with Lemuel
Wilmarth and at the Art Students
League with
John George Brown. In 1882, he
was elected
a member of the National Academy
of Design.
He spent four years in Van Buren,
Tennessee,
painting Civil War depictions
and rural genre
and then worked as an illustrator
for several
magazines including "Harper's
Monthly."
Numerous times from 1876 he traveled
in the
West, living on Army posts and
with Indian
tribes and recording the various
lifestyles
with camera and brushes. From
his studios
in New York City and Nashville,
Tennessee,
he made paintings based on these
studies.
In the 1880s, he was among a
group of eleven
artists including Peter Moran,
Julian Scott,
and Walter Shirlaw, who were
commissioned
by the Federal Government to
illustrate the
Eleventh Census of 1890. The
result was one
of the most comprehensive sources
of American
Indian life ever published, a
683 page document,
which he wrote as well as helped
illustrate.
Between 1905 and 1910, he did
paintings of
women and children, sometimes
in seaside
settings and in dark tones reminiscent
of
work by Winslow Homer.
Many of his paintings are in
the Birmingham,
Alabama, Museum of Art, and an
account of
his travels in Mexico and South
America was
exhibited at the Columbian Exposition
in
Chicago in 1893.
Source:
Michael David Zellman, Three
Hundred Years
of American Art
Note: This painting was professionally re-lined
and re-framed - prior to our acquisition.
The painting is unsigned and without provenance,
and is most probably a copy of the color
lithograph of the same title was published
in the 1889 Christmas issue of Judge (now in the A. S. K. Brown Military Collection
of Brown University). That lithograph was
re-produced for the cover of Civil War TImes Illustrated, May 1970 and includes some detail not visible
in the painting. The painting features heavy
impasto brush work and was executed by a
very gifted artist. The painting is priced
for the quality of the work and the desirability
of the subject. Comparible paintings by Gilbert
Gaul have sold at auction for over $20,000.
$3500.00
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Thistle Fine Art · P. O. Box 714 · 8A Main Street ·
Rockport, MA 01966 · 978-546-2020
