Prior to Charles Frederic Ramsey, Impressionism largely held sway among the painters of the New Hope, PA art colony. Ramsey was born in 1875 in Pont-Aven, France. He trained at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1903, Ramsey first visited New Hope and took to spending his summers there, befriending artists William Lathrop and Robert Spencer. After stints working at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and the Minneapolis School of Art, Ramsey settled permanently with his family in New Hope in 1917. His early work was Impressionist in style, but he shifted to a more modernist, abstract mode around 1919.
In 1930, Ramsey formed an avant-garde artists collective, the New Group, which was renamed The Independents in 1932. After becoming close friends with Louis Stone and Charles Evans, the trio started teaching summer school classes in non-objective painting. Inspired by the improvisational, responsive process of jazz musicians working together, they also formed the Collaborative Painting Project in 1937. This led to a series of works in which up to eight artists would take turns applying paint to canvases that were signed RAMSTONEV (a contracted compound of Ramsey, Stone, and Evans). Ramsey continued to produce several powerful modernist works of his own up until his passing in New Hope in 1951. While Ramsey's paintings were never shown widely during his lifetime or included in any major exhibition catalogs, his abstractions compare favorably to those of better-known, critically acclaimed artists.
Auction Results Charles Frederic Ramsey
