Selected Pictures

Earl Cunningham Henry ii 1930 Oil on fiberboard 18 x 23 3/4 inches

Berry-Hill Galleries is pleased to announce an exhibition of oil paintings by Earl Cunningham, one of the leading American folk artists of the 20th century. The thirty paintings on view represent all aspects of Cunningham’s whimsical and brightly colored imaginary world.

Cunningham was born in Maine, and traveled up and down the eastern seaboard for many years, ultimately settling around 1950 in St. Augustine, Florida. He was a professional sailor and itinerant laborer, who taught himself to paint in order to make a visual record of his adventures and fantasies. For the last two decades of his life he maintained a bric-a-brac shop, where he also displayed his paintings, none of which were for sale–it was his dream that they stay together and form a museum after his death. As a result very few of the paintings have been dispersed until recently. Since 1970 there have been numerous museum exhibitions, largely in Florida, with one traveling to 18 museums across the country. During this time, his art has garnered a broad following, and several distinguished art historians, including Barbara Weinberg, Robert Hobbs and Virginia Mecklenburg, have admired his vibrant, inventive palette and idiosyncratic compositions, and compared him artistically with such seminal figures as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Derain, Matisse, Burchfield and Hartley.

Cunningham is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where he is represented in the permanent collection. He is also represented in other important museums, including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Art Center, Williamsburg, Virginia, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of American Folk Art, New York. The largest collection of Cunningham is featured in the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, Florida.

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Berry-Hill Galleries is open Monday through Friday
9:30 -5:30; Saturday, 10:00 to 5:00.