Samuel Brecher.
“Still River” 1932.
American Expressionist (1897-1982).
Framed Dimensions:
22.5” x 19” x 2”
Interior Painting:
17.5” x 13.5”
Enchanting riverscape in rich pallet with bold brushwork painted in 1932 by American Expressionist Samuel Brecher. Includes correspondence from the artist to original collector.
Samuel Becher was born in 1897 in Boryslaw, then a part of Austria and now a part of Poland. His family immigrated to the United States in 1910, settling in New York. Becher graduated from Cooper Union in 1921 and then continued his studies at the National Academy of Design (1921 - 1924) and privately with Charles W. Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He established himself as a painter of cityscapes and coastal Maine and Cape Cod scenes before turning his attention to clowns, in the vein of Cortland Butterfield, Walter Kuhn and Georges Rouault. A show of clown paintings by Becher, Kuhn, Rouault, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso was shown in San Francisco in 1942. In addition to his art career he taught at the WPA from 1933 - '38, and from 1946 until his retirement in 1974 he taught drawing and painting at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. He was a member of the Audubon Artists, Allied Artists, National Society of Casein Painter, and the New Jersey Painters and Sculptors Society.