**Originally Listed At $250**

Theodor Herzl Rome (American, 1914-1965). Two watercolor paintings of Laurentian Mountains, Quebec, ca. 1940s and Indian Pipes, Maine, ca. 1950s. "Laurentians" is handwritten on verso of the landscape format watercolor. "DR" (initials for artist's son David) on verso of portrait format watercolor. A pair of stunning watercolors by mid-century American artist Theodor Herzl Rome - the landscape format composition depicting views of Quebec's Laurentian Mountains; the portrait format watercolor depicting Indian Pipes, Maine. Both were created en plein air and rendered with Rome's loose, expressive brushwork in an appealing color palette - shades of spring and forest green, teal and aqua, pink and peach, gold and amber, chocolate and siena, plum and violet. Size (portrait format painting): 14" L x 9.75" W (35.6 cm x 24.8 cm) Size (landscape format painting): 10.875" L x 14.5" W (27.6 cm x 36.8 cm)

About the artist: "Theodor Herzl Rome was born in Worcester, MA, in 1914, and began painting there as a child. He studied philosophy and aesthetics under Alfred North Whitehead, David Prall, and Harry Wolfson at Harvard, where he graduated at the top of his class in 1937. In his early twenties he spent a year in the Middle East, studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and traveling through Persia sketching and making watercolors, as well as a summer sailing around the Mediterranean with a crew that included two classmates with Maine connections, Gil Gilpatrick and Bob Cumming.

Moving to Paris to pursue his painting in earnest, Herzl had his studies soon interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He returned to the US, tried to enlist, was turned down, and spent the war years working as a draftsman and designer in a New York City naval architecture firm. In 1941 he married Chawa (Eva) Schocken, daughter of a prominent German Jewish family that had fled Berlin in 1933. Her father Salman Schocken, a department store magnate in Germany before the war, was a leading collector and patron of the arts, a bibliophile, and the founder of the New York publishing house Schocken Books.

In the late 1940's, on a business trip to Bangor, Herzl tried to look up his old classmate Bob Cumming. He was directed by Bob's father--the beloved Dr. Charles Cumming, who ministered to congregations on both Great Cranberry and Isleford for many years--to Cranberry Island, where Bob and his wife Jean were building a log cabin looking north across the ocean to the panorama of the Mt. Desert skyline. Herzl's first Maine watercolors were done there in early June of 1949.

Throughout the decade of the 1950's, Herzl and Chawa returned with their growing family, arriving on the island as soon as school was out in New York in late June and not leaving before Labor Day. They purchased one of the oldest houses on Great Cranberry, built by Capt. Benjamin Spurling in the early 1800's, where Herzl used a north-facing upstairs bedroom as a studio. Most of his time, though, was spent sketching and painting in the woods and along the shore. For the school year, he created a studio in a detached garage at his home in Scarsdale, New York, where he made oil paintings that drew on the drawings and watercolors of the previous summer.

Herzl was a warm and gifted conversationalist and a much-loved member of the group of artists summering on the island during the 1950's: Carl Nelson, Louis Finkelstein and Gretna Campbell, Charles and Jean Wadsworth, Jack Heliker and Bob Lahotan, Ashley Bryan, Emily Nelligan, and more. There were sociable dinners at one another's houses, often followed by sessions of baroque recorder music orchestrated by Ashley. A highlight of each summer was the Art Exhibit on the second floor of the schoolhouse during the Cranberry Island Fair, an event of keen excitement in which all the artists participated in those days (not without some creative controversy when it came to hanging the pictures). Apart from this, Herzl rarely exhibited his work. Only a handful of pieces were sold during his lifetime and most remain to the present day in the possession of his four children.

Following the death in 1959 of Salman Schocken, Herzl took over the direction of Schocken Books. This quickly became a consuming vocation, leaving no time for art. His last works, from the summer of 1960, are a series of swift, colorful pastels executed on cheap paper for pleasure and to try to keep his hand in trim. Herzl died suddenly from a cerebral aneurysm in August of 1965 at age 50, following a day-long hike up Sargent's Mountain--whose humpy profile, as seen from Cranberry Island, figures in so many of his water colors and paintings." (Source: The artist's son, David, wrote this biography for an exhibition of his father's artwork at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.)

Provenance: private Louisville, Colorado, USA collection

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#180996

"Laurentians" is handwritten on verso of the landscape format watercolor. "DR" (initials for artist's son David) on verso of portrait format watercolor. Tape on verso (corners) of landscape format watercolor. Light sketch on verso of portrait format watercolor. Both paintings present with vivid imagery and vibrant hues.