About Babcock Galleries

From the Gallery’s earliest years it has been an important source for major works by America’s greatest masters. Highlights of Babcock Galleries’ history include the 1866 George Inness exhibition, which featured the monumental PEACE AND PLENTY now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the Inness paintings we have placed in recent years are SUNSET AT MONTCLAIR acquired by the Montclair Art Museum and SUNBURST, an exceptional masterwork acquired through Babcock Galleries by the Palmer Museum of Art. Babcock Galleries has handled many works by Winslow Homer, including the famous THE GALE sold to the Worcester Art Museum in 1916 for a then record price of $30,000. The Gallery was also agent for the Estate of Thomas Eakins, placing significant paintings in major museums from New York to Honolulu. In recent years we have sold a number of significant Eakins works, including one of his largest paintings: A STREET SCENE, SEVILLE. For the past half century Babcock Galleries has also been the leading source for works by Marsden Hartley. More than fifty museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, and the Huntington Museum and Library have acquired Babcock Hartleys. During the past few years we have sold nearly twenty major Marsden Hartley paintings, including one of his most famous works, MOUNTAINS IN STONE, DOGTOWN, 1931, which was featured in both the National Gallery’s Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum’s retrospective exhibition Marsden Hartley. For more than ten years Babcock Galleries has been the exclusive agent for the heirs of Edwin Dickinson. In that role we have sold more than one hundred works to important public and private collections nationwide. Similarly, as agent for the Estate of Charles Hawthorne, we have recently placed more than thirty works in collections. Today, Babcock Galleries remains a key source for important American art of all periods. In the past few years the gallery has sold many exceptional works including a life portrait of George Washington by Edward Savage; Charles Deas’ famous LONG JAKES, Randolph Rogers’ iconic NYDIA, THE BLIND GIRL OF POMPEII, a major luminist painting by Jervis McEntee; a classic Frederic Church American landscape; and Robert Duncanson’s amazing 1850 VIEW OF ASHVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA. In recent years five museums have acquired six highly important Severin Roesen still life paintings from the gallery. We have sold important works by Fitz Hugh Lane, Asher B. Durand, William Sidney Mount, Sanford Gifford, and placed more than twenty-five works by John F. Kensett, including what is perhaps his finest Beacon Rock, Newport painting. Masters such as Ralph Blakelock, Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Mary Cassatt, and Childe Hassam have figured in sales and exhibitions. We are particularly pleased to have sold some of the finest works that have entered the market place by George Luks, Ernest Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, John F. Carlson, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Weber, Milton Avery, and Franz Kline. Our current inventory includes landmark works by John F. Kensett, Severin Roesen, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, Charles Webster Hawthorne, Edwin Dickinson, George McNeil, Will Barnet, and Paul Wonner. Babcock Galleries’ long and distinguished tradition of connoisseurship and service assure the highest quality of important American art to our clientele, museums and private collectors alike.