HERMAN W. HANSEN (1854-1924) "Bad News at the Pony Express" 31" x 39" (sight) 43" x 51" (frame)

This biography from the Archives of AskART: Born in Dithmarschen, Germany, Herman Hansen created meticulous watercolors and oils expressive of by-gone days of the Old West, its horses, cowboys, and others passing through.

As a youngster, his imagination was stirred by James Fenimore Cooper's novel "Leather Stocking Tales" of the rugged life in the American West. His father, a rector and draftsman who encouraged his son's talent, sent him at age 16 to Hamburg, Germany to study with a painter of military battles and another who did detailed still life's. In 1876, he studied in England for a year and learned a meticulous graphics style which determined his photo real western genre. Hearing stories of the American West sparked his imagination, and he emigrated to New York City in 1877.

Several years later he went to Chicago where Northwestern Railway personnel in 1879 commissioned advertisement scenes of the West including ones of trains going across Indian country. His most famous western genre work was "The Pony Express," 1900.

In 1882, after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and supporting himself as a commercial artist, he made San Francisco his permanent home, and from there he made frequent sketching trips to Montana and the Southwest. Artist friends and painting companions in San Francisco were William Keith and Maynard Dixon, and he held his first exhibition in 1901. During the earthquake and fire of 1906, his studio was destroyed, and he relocated across the bay to Alameda, where he lived until his death in 1924 at age 70. Toward the end of his life, he took up etching, but he always preferred watercolors. His son, Armin Hansen, became a famous marine painter and etcher.

In 1903, he painted for a summer on the Crow Reservation in Montana. Of his discouragement with the waning West, he said of Tucson, Arizona: "they have shut down all the gambling houses, and not a gun in sight. Why the place hasn't the pictorial value of a copper cent any longer."

Source: Peggy and Harold Samuels "Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West".

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Miriam McKinnie was a painter, muralist, and lithographer who studied at the Minneapolis School of Fine Art and the Kansas City Art Institute. She exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, the Kansas City Art Institute and in 1947 at the Corcoran Gallery Biennial. Member of the National Association of Woman Painters and Sculptors. Prizes won: St. Louis Artist Guild, 1929, 1903, 1931, 1933 (prize), Kansas City Art Institute, 1932 (medal), 1933 (prize), NAWPS, 1935 (prize) among others. Work: Murals in Edwardsville Ill, Public Library, United States Post Office's in Marshall and Forest Park, Ill. WPA Artist.

Oil on canvas, dated 1942, sight 21 3/8" tall x 25 1/4" wide, frame 27 1/4" tall x 31" wide

Born in Massapegua, NY in 1902 Daniel Celentano at the age of twelve was Thomas Hart Benton's first and youngest student. Attended Parsons School of Design and the National Academy of Design. Celentano often focused on the Italian neighborhood of NYC where he was born and raised as the subject matter of his drawings, paintings and murals. He enjoyed an active career, exhibiting at all the major museums as an accomplished American Scene painter during the WPA and WWII era. His first one-man show was held in 1939 at the Walker Art Galleries. At the start of WWII, Celentano went to work at the Grumman Aircraft Plant, where he executed a mural on "The Story of Flight." Exhibited: Brooklyn Museum, 1935; Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1937–1939; Art Institute of Chicago, 1937-1942; Detyroit Art Institute, 1937; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 1936-1942, among others.

Oil on canvas, circa 1940, sight 20 1/4" tall x 24 1/4" wide, frame 29" tall x 33 3/4" wide