Samuel Edmund Oppenheim (1901-1992) occupies a unique place in the history of American painting. A thoroughgoing Impressionist*, he was a student of Charles Hawthorne on Cape Cod and Harvey Dunn in New York. Another strong influence was Walter Biggs, the incomparable American illustrator whose freely-brushed watercolor paintings graced most leading magazines in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.

Oppenheim was principally a painter of charming easel pictures, which exude a gracious, mellow poetry. Several motifs recur with frequency in his oeuvre: mother and child in an idyllic landscape, beautiful women posing modestly in a gentle Victorian interior, lush floral still lifes, young ballerinas posing in stage costume, decorou...