Like Steele, sculptor and ceramist Carl Walters experimented with metallic faience glazes, seeking the deep turquoise shade developed by the Egyptians. Cox pulls out a Walters plate with a figure in black against a turquoise background. Barely lighter than the black, it glows with an otherworldly splendor.
Walters fired ceramics and glass in a kiln at the Maverick Colony, a Byrdcliffe offshoot that was also fertile ground for artists, some of whom gathered around sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. A former student of Rodin, she used her wealth to support many young artists who were ignored by the arts establishment but later became well-known.
In 1930-31, when Whitney’s studio club on West 8th Street in Manhattan became the first Whitney Museum of American Art, Walters was commissioned to create panes for the glass entrance doors. Cox has two of the many prototypes Walters produced, with raised reliefs of animals and circus scenes.
“People bring me things,” says Cox, accounting for the breadth of his collection, which contains many art-colony artifacts, including handprinted posters, playbills, and literary magazines produced by the Maverick Press. Like other antiques dealers, he is often asked to examine works of art to determine “what something is, who made it, and what it’s worth.”
He opens a November 1918 copy of “The Plowshare,” featuring poetry and exquisite prints from woodcuts and linocuts. “These items are all highly collectible,” Cox says. His Woodstock Library Fair posters document a continuing tradition that goes back 80 years.
Artistic inheritance
Stepping back to the previous century, we find paintings by a number of Hudson Valley artists whose work expresses the passion for landscape that brought visitors to the Catskills in the 1800s. While paintings by the major Hudson River School artists — Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Asher Durand — are rarely available, many painters born and bred in the area created beautiful pieces with local appeal.
Sanford Levy, proprietor of Jenkinstown Antiques in Gardiner, deals in works by such artists as landscape painter Joseph Tubby, a Rondout resident, and Kingston-born artist Julia Dillon, who specialized in meticulous floral paintings. Dillon studied art in New York and Paris before returning to her hometown, where she helped establish Kingston Hospital and Kingston Library.
