This is a painting in the “Thickly Piled Patches of Color” style. The entire painting vividly expresses the inner powers and conceptions underlying the artist’s techniques. The work is simple, casual, and natural. The sunflowers, stems, leaves, vase, and tabletop fully reveal adeptness in the application of color patches and brushwork based on a magnanimous, unattached state of mind. Four different techniques were used to convey the Thickly Piled Patches of Color style, all of which show the skills of the artist in depicting this picturesque scene. Impressionism and realism are both incorporated within this work.

A small number of color patches form a charming image of the flowers. Smooth, vigorous, and natural strokes portray a scene of rare artistry. The sunflowers have an extremely interesting withered quality, even an insect-infested look, which leaves a lasting impression on the viewer. The sunflower works of the great master of oil paintings, Vincent van Gogh, reached the pinnacle of art in the history of Western painting. Yet, when compared with those remarkable paintings of van Gogh, this sunflower painting by H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III inspires great admiration, leaving the viewer with only one impression: artistry too beautiful to be duplicated, embodying both impressionism and realism, has come to this world through the “Thickly Piled Patches of Color” style!

Young Girl Seated on a Marble Bench (#342) Artist: Pascal de Beucker (1861-1945) An extremely rare and important example of de Beucker’s secular figurative work, this beautifully painted image of a young girl seated on a marble bench dates to 1908, considered his best period. De Beucker is remembered as possibly Belgium’s finest painter of still-life subjects at the turn of the twentieth century, and his figure paintings are equally competent. Pascal de Beucker was born in 1861 in Antwerp, where he studied at the Academy under Farasyn and Lauwers. Upon graduation he commenced exhibiting at a number of Belgium’s prominent Salons, winning numerous medals and prizes for his figurative painting. In 1904 he left Belgium for the United States, where he settled in Springfield, Illinois. While in the United States, he became highly sought after for his portraits, which he executed with an attention to detail of the highest quality. In 1910 he returned to Belgium, married and settled in the town of Mortsel, and commenced painting the floral compositions for which he is now best known.

Pascal de Beucker continued to paint until his death in 1945. His works have been collected by the Albert van Dyck Museum and other museums. In the year 2000, a major retrospective of his life and work was held at the Albert van Dyck Museum.

Portrait of an Officer (#366) Artist: David Martin (1737-1797) David Martin was a leading Scottish painter of portraits, and he was born in Anstruther on April 1st, 1737. Martin painted over 300 portraits in his lifetime. One of the earliest independent ones is the 1767 one of Benjamin Franklin (now in the White House, Washington, DC). His most influential works depict Scottish Enlightenment figures like the chemist Joseph Black (1787) and the philosopher David Hume (1770), and noblewomen such as the Honorable Barbara Gray (1787). In 1785 he was appointed principal painter to the Prince of Wales in Scotland.

The officer depicted in this painting is seen wearing the uniform of the Sixth (or Inniskilling) Regiment of Dragoons; an extremely likely candidate would be William, Lord Banff, who had joined the regiment on May 2nd, 1780 and had, by 1789, attained the rank of Captain. Dr. Allan Carsewell of the Department of Armed Forces History, part of the National Museums of Scotland, has provided the information above.

Works by David Martin are collected by internationally famed museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, the H.M. Queen Elizabeth Collection in London, and other museums in Scotland, Australia, and the United States.

Born in Kortrijk on June 30, 1869, Vierin was a pupil at the Kortrijk Academy and at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp under Coosemans. Much of his subsequent life was spent in academia, with his nomination as a teacher at the Academy of Kortrijk in 1896 and directorship in 1912.

His paintings have a poetic quality and are related to impressionism. Much of his work depicted landscape views in and around Antwerp and Bruges. He was particularly interested in the play of light within his subjects, a talent clearly evident in this example. This important painting of the artist’s work, previously in the collection of the family of the painter, dates to around 1901, considered Vierin’s finest period. It depicts the old water-mill in the village of Heule, near Kortrijk, a view Vierin painted on a number of occasions. In fact, one of his famous paintings currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp depicts this water mill, although that work shows it during the summer months. His paintings are collected by important museums, including the Palais Des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium, and the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.

Charles Henri Joseph Leickert was born on September 22, 1816, in Brussels. Leickert began his artistic training at the age of eleven. In 1827, his father enrolled him in The Hague Drawing Academy, where he studied under Bartholomeus van Hove (1790- 1880), the well-known artist of landscapes and cityscapes. Around 1835 Leickert joined the studio of Wijnand Nuyen (1813-1839), the painter who specialized in landscape paintings. Nuyen’s tutelage is evident in his choice of picturesque townscapes with lively details, such as laundry and pigeons.

Leickert’s next and most influential teacher was Andreas Schelfhout (1787-1870), the renowned artist best known for his winter scenes. It was under Schelfhout that Leickert diligently learned to paint winter scenes, and he rapidly absorbed his master’s working methods. In 1856, Leickert joined the Board of Governors of the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Amsterdam. The years following his arrival in Amsterdam until the 1870s were Leickert’s most successful. During that period, he produced a wider variety of themes that included more beach and dune scenes. His works are collected by a number of world-renowned museums, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Although much better remembered as a musician, Rafael Joseffy was also a talented artist, as this beautiful seascape would attest. Painted in 1882, it is inscribed with the word ‘Wien,’ which is the Austrian form of the city Vienna. Paintings by Rafael Joseffy are extremely rare and although it is unclear as to where he was trained as an artist, it is assumed that he just possessed an extraordinary natural talent for painting. Most of the paintings that survive are painted in oils, although a few drawings and watercolors also are known.

From the paintings that we can identify as his work, we see that he attempted a number of different subject matters. In the 1990s a painting by Joseffy appeared at a public sale in Austria. That work depicted an extensive mountain scene in the Austrian Alps and was painted with the same exactitude as this example. In the 1970s another work surfaced, that being a lake scene, probably also in the Alpine region. That painting was of the identical size as this example. This particular work by Joseffy is one of his extremely hard to come by works of art.

A fabulous example of the artist’s work, this portrait perfectly illustrates her skills as a painter of portraits and figures. Dating to 1880, Fanny Geefs-Corr has depicted a young girl in the costume of her time holding a bunch of roses. Of particular note are the rather unusual oval format and the presence of a superb original frame.

The artist Fanny Corr was born in Brussels in 1807. As a young girl she studied portrait and figure painting under the guidance of Jean Francois Navez at the Brussels Academy before embarking on a professional career around 1830. Shortly after that, she met, and within a couple of years married, the sculptor Guillaume Geefs, and together they established a studio in Brussels. For a while she chose to sign her works ‘Fanny Geefs-Corr’ but later in life dropped her maiden name from her signature.

She died in Brussels in 1883, but her works are collected by the illustrious Museum of Kortrijk in Belgium and other museums.

Born in Maine, Charles Dorman Robinson’s parents moved to California in 1850 when he was three years old, and he grew up in San Francisco. At thirteen he was awarded a diploma by the Mechanics’ Institute for best marine drawing. He was recognized as a first-rate marine painter in 1878, when he won all the prizes at the Sacramento State Fair. In the 1870’s, new ideas from Europe were being introduced. One of these was the plein air technique that gave artists the freedom to explore the atmospheric effects of light and color. Robinson was in Paris for the 1900 Exposition, where one of his paintings was purchased by a British noble. It was late presented to Queen Victoria, who hung the picture in Buckingham Palace. Tragically, many of Robinson’s works were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco fire, and in a 1921 fire at his Laguna Street home that took more than twenty years of his Yosemite paintings. Robinson, together with Jules Tavernier, was co-founder of the Palette Club in San Francisco.