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Vermont Barn, c. 1947, oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches, signed with the location “Vermont” lower left; exhibited at Poray’s solo exhibition at Hartwell Galleries, Los Angeles, California, November 1947 (see Reuter, Herman, At the Galleries, Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, November 8, 1947)
$3,500
About the Painting
Vermont Barn is among the best of Stan Poray’s late works. After achieving renown in California for his detailed Oriental still lifes, Poray returned to the landscape painting tradition toward the end of his life. In a very positive review of one of Poray’s solo exhibitions in 1947, the art critic for the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, called special attention to Vermont Barn, “Exceptional clarity of color, shrewdly distributed, plus strict adherence to an individual point of view, mark a handsome exhibition of oils which Stan Poray has hung at the Harwell Galleries . . . The excellence throughout, high as it is, is enhanced still further by three more-than exceptional pieces: ‘Vermount Barn,’ a sunny unusually creative canvas . . . Not the least of the merits of these canvases is the pinterlike attention given, in a majority of them, to three-dimensional modeling.” Vermont Barn is a wonderful late American Scene painting which approaches its subject with the same gusto as Luigi Lucioni’s rural architectural works from the same period and geography.
About the Artist
Stan Poray was a painter, illustrator and art instructor who spent most of his adult life living and working in the Los Angeles area. Poray was born to a noble family in Krakow, Poland. His father was a landscape painter. Stan Poray studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and later in Paris. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, he moved to Asia where he painted members of the Imperial family and other white Russians. Poray then moved to Los Angeles in 1921 where he quickly became established in the southern California art scene. During the 1920s, Poray specialized in depicting landscapes, coastal scenes, and California’s missions. Later, Poray began to add meticulous Asian-influenced still life paintings to his oeuvre. Poray also portrayed scenes from his travels, including in the American northeast. Throughout his career, Poray exhibited extensively, including at the Los Angeles County Museum, Stendahl Gallery (Los Angeles), the Fogg Museum (Harvard), the Golden Gate International Exhibition, the Detroit Institute of Art and various other California venues. Poray is listed in Who was Who in American Art and all other standard references.