Florida Art Galleries- Art in St. Augustine

Art in St. Augustine

Then we find the artistry of Charles King. Charles Bird King spent much of is efforts recording the Native Floridian in portraits. He painted Osceola , the Seminole chief.

St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement, also came to be the first center of art in Florida. It was to be reinvented several times. First, after the Civil War, when Northerners began to flock to Florida for health and pleasure, art found a place in the thriving business of travel literature.

This called to artist like Edward and Thomas Moran (landscapes early central peninsula), who began to paint the beauty of Florida. Edward Moran was known for his romantic Florida seascapes. Thomas Moran painted realistic landscapes from around the central portion of the Floridian peninsula.

In the 1880s, St. Augustine, through the efforts of Henry Flagler, again became the center of artistic endeavor, attracting artists like Martin Johnson Heade. A landscape painter who traveled much of is early career then after a stay in New York, Heade finally settled in Florida.

At the end of the century many prominent American artists arrived and painted the Florida they found. This included Frederic Remington, Hermann Herzog, Winslow Homer and George Inness. Innes paintings focus on landscapes and can be found hanging in the Tampa Museum of Art and the Boca Raton Museum of Art. As an artist Innes felt that there was a higher being in the wholeness of nature, His paintings reflect this.

Anthony Thieme

In the first half of the twentieth century, Florida paintings were created by such notables as John Singer Sargent, Jane Patterson, Martha Walter, Milton Avery, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Harold Betts, and Frank Weston Benson. One of these is Anthony Thieme.

Many schools claim the work of Anthony Thieme. He was born in Rotterdam, Holland and then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam. He then moved to the Royal Academy at The Hague (1905), as an apprentice artist in Düsseldorf, Germany, under George Hoecker, Germany's foremost stage designer (1906-08), and at the School of Fine Arts, Turin (1909-1910).

After completing his studies he traveled in Europe, England, and South America, and he worked as a stage designer in these places both before and after coming to the United States in 1917. In 1919 he settled in Boston where for nine years he worked as a designer and painter of stage settings for the Copley Theatre, while also doing book illustrations for Boston publishers.

By 1927, Thieme had established a studio at Cape Ann in Rockport, Massachusetts, where he taught summer painting classes and became well-known for his seascapes and shore scenes. While he worked in an Impressionist manner, he was also profoundly influenced by the Dutch seascape tradition, and was particularly interested in the effects of light on water. His work was exhibited in New York, Washington, Paris, and London, and was acquired by many museums.

In 1946, Thieme's Cape Ann studio burned down, together with much of his work of the previous thirty years. Rather than rebuild his life in Massachusetts, Thieme struck out for territory which he had not previously explored. His first stop was Charleston, South Carolina, where he spent two months in prolific activity, inspired by the revelation of light and color far more intense than that to which he had become accustomed.

The paintings that he produced in Charleston were a far cry from his "picturesque New England harbor scenes," as the reviewer of Thieme's exhibition in 1947 at the Grand Central Art Galleries acknowledged. The serenity and tonal discipline of his seascapes was abandoned for the elaborations of wrought iron and profusion of blossoms that Charleston imposed on his senses. The heady aroma of the Southern landscape induced him to continue his travels - to St. Augustine. This move caused the Lost Colony to claim him. This time in his career was the time when experts claim he did his best work with light and color. He painted many marinescapes in Florida and Nassau in 1948, to Guatemala in 1949, to the Riviera in 1951, and to Spain in the year of his death, in 1954.
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