AFA Summer 2019

Antiques & Fine Art 81 2019 Working Like a Dog , is on view at Pebble Hill Plantation, Thomasville, Georgia, through April 25, 2019. It will return to the John L. Wehle Gallery, at the Genesee Village and Museum in Mumford, New York, where it will be on view from May 11 through Columbus Day, 2019. For more information visit www.pebblehill.com or www.gcv.org. Patricia Tice is curator of the John L. Wehle Gallery, Mumford, New York. All images from the collection of the Genesee Country Village and Museum. Perceval Rosseau’s life reads like an action adventure. Born in Louisiana on a plantation later destroyed by General Sherman, Rosseau was orphaned during the Civil War. A former slave took Rosseau and his sister to family friends in Kentucky, who raised the pair. Rosseau learned to hunt and shoot in the Kentucky hills and fields, but when he demonstrated artistic abilities, his guardians sent him to a private school, where he studied drawing. Around the age of eighteen, Rosseau headed west, where he worked as a cowboy and cattle drover on the Chisholm Trail. He later became a successful import broker in New Orleans and New York. At the age of thirty-five, he moved with his family to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. There he fell under the spell of the Barbizon School, artists who painted directly from nature, focusing on rural landscapes and preindustrial subjects. In 1904, the artist submitted two paintings of setters in landscapes to the Paris Salon. “The day after the Salon opened I received eleven telegrams asking my prices for the pictures,” the artist recalled, “and I sold both in a few hours. Thereafter I had little trouble selling my work.”  1 From that point on, Rosseau devoted himself almost entirely to the painting of dogs, becoming the premier American dog painter. Rosseau continued to work in this style upon his return to the U.S., finding inspiration from the Sullivan County, New York, landscape and the hills of North Carolina. Painting only sporting dogs, Rosseau infused his canvases with a soft light and atmosphere. He captures the essence of a sporting dog in the field yet maintains the beauty and vastness of the landscape as well. “A man should paint what he knows best,” Percival Rosseau wrote “and I know more about animals then [ sic ] anything else. I have run hounds from childhood, and have at my fingertips the thorough knowledge of dogs necessary to paint them faithfully.”  2 1.  William Secord, A Breed Apart (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2001), 128.    2.  Ibid. Percival Rosseau (1859–1937), Setter in an Open Field, 1929. Oil on canvas, 26 x 33½ inches.