#22 • 1908 Helen Maria Turner "Cragsmoor" Color Pastel on Paper

Part of Multi-Estate Auction at The Gallery (timed auction by Wardlow Auctions)

High bid $856.00

Status: Sold

Category: Art

Louisville, KY native Helen Turner was an American painter and teacher known for her work in oils, watercolors, and pastels in which she created miniatures, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, often in an Impressionist style.  This pieces comes with paperwork from the 1980's discussing this particular piece by Lewis Hoyer Rabbage who curated "Helen M. Turner: A Retrospective Exhibiton", a booklet of the exhibition, and old newspaper articles. Framed size: 12.5"w x 10"h Exposed Area of Art size: 9.5"w x 7"h Please read below to learn more about Helen M. Turner. She also responded strongly to the environment and residents of Cragsmoor, an artists’ colony in the Shawangunk Mountains, about eighty miles from New York. Painter Charles Courtney Curran (1861–1942), who had first visited in 1903 and found the natural beauty of the mountainous terrain appealing, invited Turner to Cragsmoor in 1906, and in 1910 she built a house and studio there. (2) She also designed a garden adjacent to the house, which she often used as the setting for her paintings. Between 1906 and 1941, Turner spent almost every summer at Cragsmoor, making many paintings in that hospitable environment. Turner exhibited regularly in the early 1920s, and in 1921 became only the third woman to be named an academician of the National Academy of Design. Not long after, however, in 1926, she closed her New York studio and returned to New Orleans, where she continued painting portraits until her eyesight began to fail in the 1940s.