Author: FOSTER, Kathleen
Title: Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869
Description: Yale, 2008. 160 pp. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket. New copy ¶ Labeled as a travelling American folk artist when he was rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century, the mysterious Thomas Chambers here receives a fresh and creative reassessment. Although his distinctive land- and seascapes appear in many American collections, little is known about this English-born painter, who arrived in New Orleans in 1832 and disappeared from the record in the mid-1860s, leaving many paintings that later resurfaced in rural New York and Massachusetts. In this richly illustrated work, Kathleen Foster shows, however, that far from being simply an itinerant painter of folk art, Chambers actually enjoyed a professional, even entrepreneurial, relationship to the art world.Foster performs close studies of Chambers' known works, his stylistic relationship to his brother (English marine painter George Chambers), and a newly discovered American auction record of 1845.

Keywords: Art - kunst|new books