Lot 226: Isaac Snowman (British, b. 1874)

Picking Apples
signed with initials in ligature, 'ISnowman' (lower left)
oil on canvas
41 3/4 x 23 3/4 in. (106 x 60.3 cm.)

THE PROPERTY OF A MARYLAND COLLECTOR

Isaac Snowman was born in Palestine in 1874, but had moved to London by 1893 where he exhibited his first paining at the Royal Academy, Tales of a Grandfather. At the time he was living in the Euston Road in London, but two years later, once he had begun to paint portraits, he moved to St. John's Wood, the most fashionable neighborhood for artists at the end of the century. Snowman moved once more in 1898, when he set up a studio on Fortune Green Road in West Hampstead, an affluent enclave for the Jewish colony of London, and he remained at that residence for the next ten years.

His paintings of children and elegantly-dressed women are wholly English in both conception and execution, and are closely linked with the work of Arthur John Elsley and Frederick Morgan.