Samuel George Phillips

(American, 1890-1965)

Point Pleasant Home–Bucks County, Pennsylvania

oil on canvas

signed S. George Phillips (lower right)

25 x 30 in.

Property from the Collection of Renny Reynolds

Provenance:

Private Collection, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Gratz Gallery, New Hope, Pennsylvania, July 2005.

Lot Note:

Though well regarded during his lifetime for his commissioned portraits, landscape painting was really what Samuel George Phillips relished the most. He described his weekends spent in the Bucks County countryside as relaxing, but they also proved productive, yielding an important output of quaint Impressionist views. In Point Pleasant Home–Bucks County, Pennsylvania and Summer Shade Phillips showcases rural Pennsylvania through a bright, refreshing palette, keen draftsmanship, and a clever composition.

Point Pleasant Home–Bucks County, Pennsylvania and Summer Shade are works of both overt and concealed charm. A majestic tree takes up most of the composition, spreading its branches towards all four corners of the painting, but behind it, tucked in its shade, a cottage is revealed. In a similar gesture, the path in Point Pleasant Home slowly narrows as it winds and disappears into the wooded scenery, withdrawing from the viewer its likely idyllic destination.

The paintings thus morph into a playful escapade, a quest for enchantment, suggesting through subtle interplays of light and shade, of conspicuous and obstructed details, that a seemingly ordinary landscape is replete with beauty, if one is curious or attentive enough to discern the hidden charm in its folds.