OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2014, FROM 5 - 8PM
Sullivan Goss announces LOCKWOOD DE FOREST’s SANTA BARBARA, an exhibition of 24 paintings of Santa Barbara, Montecito, and Santa Ynez by Lockwood de Forest, NA (18501932). Painted between 1903 and 1922, these works relate a vision of the area that is no longer available. A vast and undeveloped landscape dominates. Still, the terrain is recognizable and both residents and others may find the images irresistible.
Lockwood de Forest was born to an old and prosperous family in Manhattan. While still a boy, he began to draw from nature. De Forest took his first serious steps forward as an artist while on the Grand Tour with his family at 19, when he began to train under his cousin, Frederic Church undoubtedly the most admired American landscape painter of his day. Returning home, de Forest decided to pursue a career in art and design. He spent vast amounts of time reading, designing, and painting at Olana, Church’s home in the Hudson River Valley of New York. He also took up studio space in New York’s storied Tenth Street Studio Building, where he would have worked around luminaries like Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, and William Merritt Chase. Subsequently, he married and embarked on a celebrated career in Orientalist design, though he never stopped exhibiting his paintings. At the dawn of the twentieth century, de Forest began spending months of the year in Santa Barbara. It was then that he refocused on his painting career.
De Forest ended up retiring in Santa Barbara and his son, Lockwood de Forest III, became a famous landscape architect in the area.
In 1994, Sullivan Goss began to buy and sell the paintings of an artist who was, by then, somewhat obscure. In the twenty years since, Lockwood de Forest has again become of the most recognized and sought after names in early California art. It has taken seven books and numerous museum shows on both coasts of the U.S. to reacquaint the world with the art of Lockwood de Forest, but at last, his star has reached its former brilliance.
Coming on the heels of the recent exhibition, Luminescent Santa Barbara: Lockwood de Forest, at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, Sullivan Goss will present eleven published works and thirteen neverbefore exhibited paintings.
