A whimsical little still life by New York artist Virginia Snedeker, a successful artist and illustrator in her day. Here is a recent review of her work in the New York Times.



New York Times



American Models, Plucked From Everyday Life

By Benjamin Genocchio

New York Times, Feb. 24, 2008



Virginia Snedeker was a member of the American Scene movement, a group of painters of the 1920s through the 1940s who rejected avant garde modernism and chose instead to embrace social realism and the depiction of everyday life. Ms. Snedeker focused her attention on life in New York, producing paintings and drawings in addition to illustrations and covers for The New Yorker.



But as times changed, so did tastes, and today American Scene painting is often considered an embarrassing episode in the history of American art a provincial reaction to progressive modern styles stemming from Europe. In the decades after World War II, modern art came to dominate the art world, and the American Scene painters were quietly relegated to the art-history wilderness. Many were never heard of again.



Ms. Snedeker was one of those artists whose work was shelved, but her time has come again with the arrival at the Morris Museum of a retrospective organized by Anne Gossen, a curator at the Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton, and Ann Aptaker, a Morris Museum curator. With more than 70 exhibits from the 1920s through 1950s, it provides a new look at the career of an artist hidden from view for almost half a century.



Born in New York in 1909, Ms. Snedeker studied drawing and painting at the National Academy of Design and later at the Art Students League. She was influenced by Kenneth Hayes Miller, a classical realist painter and a teacher at the Art Students League. By the mid-1930s, under Mr. Miller’s tutelage, she was making cheerful oil paintings of New York street vendors, children at play and the sidewalk interaction of neighbors.



Oil on canvas, painted in 1932. 14" x 16" in an 18" x 20" frame FREE SHIPPING!