Chas Turner(Julian Onderdonk) American Artist New York Seascape Oil Painiting Signed. Oil on Canvas; SLR; Chas.Turner, also Pseudonym for Julian Onderdonk; Staten Island seascape; 14 x 20; need cleaning.
Early-1900s paintings signed with variations on the name Chas. Turner are potentially very valuable.The Texas art historians James and Kimel Baker, a married couple, have spent decades pursuing their theory that the Turner signatures were pseudonyms used by the Texas painter Julian Onderdonk while he was living in Manhattan and on Staten Island. He was deeply in debt at the time; he turned out views of farmland and harbors signed “Chas. Turner” for a dealer acquaintance to unload quickly, with prices of a few dollars each.Mr. Baker’s new book, “Julian Onderdonk in New York: The Lost Years, the Lost Paintings” (Texas State Historical Association), coincides with an exhibition of the same name opening on Saturday at the Witte Museum in San Antonio. The show will reunite about 50 Onderdonk views of the New York area with two dozen “Turner” counterparts.The Bakers have studied hundreds of paintings and inscriptions and traveled thousands of miles to meet Onderdonk descendants and collectors. They also visited New York streets and fields where he set up his easel. They conducted their research quietly, so the project would not attract the attention of forgers. “By keeping it secret,” Mr. Baker said in an interview, “we knew that any ‘Chas. Turner’ painting that we found wasn’t a fake.”Onderdonk, a San Antonio native who died of an intestinal ailment in 1922, at 40, is best known for painting swaths of Texas bluebonnets. Those canvases can bring more than $500,000 each, while his New York scenes usually end up in the five-figure range. On May 17, a 1909 Onderdonk scene of a Staten Island inlet will be offered by Heritage Auctions in Dallas, estimated at $12,000 to $16,000.Onderdonk’s parents were painters in San Antonio, and in 1901, when he was a teenager, they sent him to New York for training. Through 1909, he lived in various Manhattan apartments and Staten Island houses. He then returned to Texas, but continued to spend months at a time in New York.

14 x 20 in