1. Ernest Fiene (American, 1894-1965)

New England Hills.
Oil on canvas, signed lower right, framed in original frame.
22" x 35-1/4".

3,000/5,000     SOLD: $4,485.00

Today Ernest Fiene is best known as a painter of the American Scene, a movement also called "Regionalism". His most celebrated works are rural landscapes such as the present work, and gritty city scenes of working class districts in highly industrialized areas such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and nearby Aliquippa. Most of his paintings from the 1930s and 40s possess a somewhat naive quality created through an almost childlike attention to small details--those which one "knows" are there but, in optical terms, are not truly observable. Such passages serve to separate his paintings from the slicker efforts of his contemporaries, and give the paintings a poignant quality of unassuming honesty.

Ernest Fiene was a German/American, born in Elberfeld Germany. He immigrated to the United States when he was sixteen and became a naturalized citizen in 1928. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1914 to 1918, at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design from 1916 to 1918, and at the Art Students League, with its less academic atmosphere, in 1923.

Provenance: Estate of Edward Bloomberg.

Circa 1940s label from Associated American Artists Gallery, New York on back of frame with inventory control number 1878 and price $1500.

Condition: surface soil, yellowed varnish.