Guy Carleton Wiggins, NA (1883-1962)

Columbus Circle, New York

Signed
Oil on Board
12 x 16 inches – 30.6 x 40.6 cms

Provenance: Charles Mather-Smith, Florida, USA, c.1960
(possibly a gift from the artist);
Private Collection, USA
Exhibitions: Birnam Wood Galleries, East Hampton, New York,
"The Urban Image: 1915-2008", 31 July – 10 August 2009
Artist Biography: Guy Wiggins was born 23rd February 1883 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Carlton Wiggins (1848-1932), a landscape painter and academician who had himself been a pupil of George Innes (1825-1894), one of the foremost landscape painters of the 19th century. Guy Wiggins studied with his father before briefly studying architecture at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn and subsequently enrolling at the National Academy. He became an outstandingly successful painter, noted for his winter scenes set in New York City where he lived in the winter months, in 1929 living on West 59th Street. Summers were spent in his father’s town of Old Lyme, Connecticut, home to a colony of painters working in an American Impressionist style, and where Wiggins painted summer landscapes under their influence. In 1937 he established an art school in the nearby town of Essex.

Wiggins was commercially enormously successful and exhibited widely, winning numerous awards; he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1916, subsequently being elected a full member, the Salmagundi Club and the National Arts Club also in 1916.

His works can be found in museums in: Brooklyn; Chicago; Dallas; Hartford; Los Angeles; Newark; New York; Richmond; Syracuse and Washington.