Bernard Corey (1914-2000)

Coastal Inlet

signed Bernard Corey, l.r., oil on board   10 x 16

Ornate Gold Frame 16 x 22

$3400F

Bernard Corey is one of New England's most beloved landscape painters of the 20th century. He executed paintings surely en plein aire with accuracy and competence. Memberships included the Rockport Art Association, Salmagundi Club, the Guild of Boston Artists, North Shore Art Association and more. Having won over 100 awards and honors, including awards at the North Shore Art Association, Rockport Art Association, Salmagundi Club, NYC, Hudson Valley Art Association, Providence Water Color Club, Allied Artists of America and many more. He painted almost every day of his life with fellow artists in the fields, along the streams and beaches and in the mountains in and around New England. Although the artist traveled throughout the world, Paris made little impression on him. He was American through-and-through.

Bernard Corey was the "last of the old school" of traditional New England landscape painters. When he died early in 2000, the era when artists painted for ten hours a day, every day with competency came to an end. Corey's carefully painted impressionistic plein aire canvases captured the essence of nature in all four seasons. The Rockport Art Association gave Corey a retrospective exhibition (October-November 2000) saluting the artist's profound understanding of nature and painting.

The Icy Falls

24 x 36 Oil on Linen

$7500 Framed (30 x 42)

Known as “the Painter of Snow,” Walter Koeniger was the son of an architect, born in Germany on May 6, 1881.  From architecture, Walter turned to painting, while still in Germany.  He studied under Eugene Gustav Dücker (1841-1916) and Eduard Karl Franz Gebhardt (1838-1925) at the Düsseldorf Academy.  Dücker studied at the Imperial Art Academy of St. Petersburg and was influenced by Russian realism. Around 1912, Koeniger settled in Woodstock, New York, where he abandoned Dücker’s crisp, photographic realism for a more painterly, expressive technique.  He concentrated on capturing the fleeting moods of nature during a period when the winter scene genre was rapidly rising in popularity.

Koeniger focused on views of the Catskill Mountains and wooded areas around Woodstock and Saugerties.  He painted in broad, large strokes, rendering brilliant sunlight and glowing color harmonies, soft gradations of color in the sky, streams and forests.  For G. Frank Muller (1925), Koeniger attempted “to convey to the beholder the rapture he experiences before nature at her best.  Koeniger seizes the delight of woodland beauties and passes it on for our enjoyment.” Reportedly, Koeniger would delay the completion of a painting until the setting sun would add the proper tint of orange to the scene.

Vose Galleries featured Koeniger’s works in December of 1926.  That year he began to exhibit his landscapes at the National Academy of Design where he returned in 1929, 1930, and 1931.  His activities at Woodstock (where he died in 1943) are not well known; apparently he was not involved with the artists’ colony there.  Koeniger was a member of the Salmagundi Club.

Sources:

Muller, G. Frank, “Koeniger, Painter of Snow,” International Studio 81 (June 1925): 210-215; Zellman, Michael David, 300 Years of American Art. Secaucus, NJ: Wellfleet Press, 1987, p. 773.