American Art

The American Art department specializes in historically significant paintings, drawings and sculpture, encompassing a wide range of schools and genres from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Our specialists have contributed to scholarship with the rediscovery and authentication of long-lost works— including Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Study of the Parthenon, 1869, which sold for $269,000. American Art offers original works by such artists as Charles Burchfield, Will Barnet, Walt Kuhn, John La Farge, Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper, Guy C. Wiggins and Hayley Lever.

Top lots include William Glackens’s The Beach, Isle Adam, circa 1925-26, which sold for $581,000. In the same sale, a rediscovered watercolor by John Marin, Small Point, Maine, from the Bumper, 1928, reached $50,000. Other significant sales include Milton Avery’s Rocky Coast, 1939, which realized $52,500; Joseph Delaney’s Third Avenue Movie, 1940, sold for $62,500; George Tooker’s Untitled (Young Man Facing a Woman), 1950, for $81,250, and Neil Welliver’s Shaled Trees, Alagash, 1994, which reached $75,000 in the same sale. 

Notable collections offered in recent years include works from the Estate of Will Barnet in 2023 and The Virginia Zabriskie Collection in 2021. Swann also offers a yearly auction dedicated to the Artists of the WPA.