Francis A. Silva was born on October 4, 1835 in New York City and died March 31, 1886. He was one of two children born to Francis John Silva (little is known about his mother except that she was born in New York). As a schoolboy, Silva exhibited pen drawings at the American Institute. Silva’s parents, however, did not want him to pursue art as a career, so he apprenticed to several trades before ending up with a sign painter. He worked in that trade until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

Silva wouldn’t begin his art career until after service in the Seventh Regiment of the New York State Militia during the Civil War. Advancing from lieutenant to captain, Silva was soon stricken with “miasmatic disease.” He was dishonorably discharged for desertion when he left his regiment, but was soon reinstated.

In 1868, Silva would marry Margaret A. Watts in Keyport, New Jersey. His debut as a painter was at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition of 1868-1869. Silva developed a reputation as a marine painter. He became known for exaggerating and intensifying natural effects of light and air for poetic purposes. His subtle manipulation of light and atmosphere was an aesthetic device that transcended naturalism and became an almost abstract means of expressing sentiment. Silva became known as one of the leaders in the American Luminist movement.

By 1870, Silva had evolved from a self-taught artist, to one with a remarkably skillful technique and a repertoire of marine subject and atmospheric effects that varied little for the rest of his life.

“We have few artists who are so accurate in drawing or so conscientious in the rendering of detail,” an Art Journal critic wrote in 1880. His luminous technique led to his election to the American Water Color Society in 1872. Just before he died in 1886, Silva painted A Summer Afternoon at Long Branch (1885, National Gallery of Art), considered his masterpiece.

MEMBERSHIPS:

American Water Color Society

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:

Broad Street Trust, Boston

Brooklyn Museum

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts

Laurent Schkolnyk was born in Paris in 1953 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Nantes from 1971 to1978. His black and white and three-plate color mezzotints have been exhibited widely and are represented in the collections of several major institutions, including the following: Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale (France), Achenbach Foundation for Arts (San Francisco), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Cleveland Museum of Art.

Anne Michalov was born in a small mining town in Grundy County, Illinois in 1904. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1920s and was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists, and during the Depression produced paintings, lithographs and public murals for Federal Art Projects. She died in Portland, Oregon in 1992. Her work is held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, the Newark (NJ) Art Museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum.