Toomey & Co. Auctioneers

Prior to Charles Frederic Ramsey, Impressionism largely held sway among the painters of the New Hope, PA art colony. Ramsey was born in 1875 in Pont-Aven, France. He trained at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1903, Ramsey first visited New Hope and took to spending his summers there, befriending artists William Lathrop and Robert Spencer. After stints working at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and the Minneapolis School of Art, Ramsey settled permanently with his family in New Hope in 1917. His early work was Impressionist in style, but he shifted to a more modernist, abstract mode around 1919.

In 1930, Ramsey formed an avant-garde artists collective, the New Group, which was renamed The Independents in 1932. After becoming close friends with Louis Stone and Charles Evans, the trio started teaching summer school classes in non-objective painting. Inspired by the improvisational, responsive process of jazz musicians working together, they also formed the Collaborative Painting Project in 1937. This led to a series of works in which up to eight artists would take turns applying paint to canvases that were signed RAMSTONEV (a contracted compound of Ramsey, Stone, and Evans). Ramsey continued to produce several powerful modernist works of his own up until his passing in New Hope in 1951. While Ramsey's paintings were never shown widely during his lifetime or included in any major exhibition catalogs, his abstractions compare favorably to those of better-known, critically acclaimed artists.

My mother, Angela, was, quite frankly, a very attractive blonde woman, who got a great deal of attention wherever she went. Although she was quite a dresser, she didn’t believe in investing in costly jewelry. She thought that synthetic stones would eventually destroy the diamond market over time (so diamonds were certainly NOT her best friend!). Instead, mom focused most of her investing into American art, especially regional artists from where she lived. Her favorite American artists were John Sloan and Thomas Hart Benton (sold by now) and she loved American bronze sculpture. As an art historian, I did much work on the Pennsylvania Impressionists and she collected a number of them, like Charles Rosen, William Lathrop, Walter Baum, and Mary Elizabeth Price. She also liked New Hope and Lambertville Modernists, like Elsie Driggs (whom we knew personally) and her husband, Lee Gatch, Charles F. Ramsey, Louis Stone, and Charles Evans. Living in New Jersey, she collected Newark School artists, including Henry Gasser, Bernard Gussow, James Carlin, and Frank C. Herbst. She purchased the Gussow many years ago from the Rabin and Krueger Gallery in Newark (long since gone, but the picture retains its gallery label on the reverse). Rabin and Krueger had probably been New Jersey’s leading art gallery. She bought the Herbst paintings in a 1970s auction from the artist's estate sale, which was held at the Mayflower Auction in Orange, New Jersey; Herbst had lived in nearby South Orange. My mother cherished art, and these paintings, all her life. I hope that they bring as much excitement and enjoyment to their new owners as they brought to her and her family over the years.