Petersburg Area Art League (PAAL) will be host of a gallery talk on January 27, 2012 at 6:30 P.M.  Alexander C. (Sandy) Graham, Jr. will be discussing the history and background of his collection of American Art that is currently on display at PAAL. This event is free and open to the public.

Mr. Graham began collecting American art about 7 years ago after many years of collecting American Queen Anne, Chippendale and Federal furniture. While his decorative arts collection also includes English, French and Russian paintings, this exhibition focuses only on the 35 American paintings, mostly oil on canvas, created between 1840 and 1940.

The paintings selected are largely landscapes and seascapes, with a few portraits. Some were actually painted in Petersburg and Richmond. Exhibited in chronological order from the date of the earliest painting, the collection shows a progression from works by practitioners of Realism and the Hudson River School style to the time when young American artists began to embrace Impressionism and the plein air style of Monet and his French contemporaries.

Representative paintings in the exhibit include a portrait of Algernon Sydney Jones painted in Petersburg in 1841; a New York landscape by Hudson River School follower, David Johnson, painted in 1867; a Vermont campfire scene by John George Brown dated 1879; “Orange Sails”, a pastel by Abbott Fuller Graves, created in Venice in 1885; and “Monhegan Island”, Maine by McClelland Barclay, a well-known American illustrator, in the 1920′s.