Frederick Ferdinand Schafer

Upper Sacramento River, California, 1880
Oil
65 x 44.50 in
ON SALE $9,568
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This very large, superb California landscape was painted by an artist celebrated for his California and Pacific Northwest scenes, and well-known among collectors of these works. Frederick Schafer emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1876 at the age of 37. He traveled widely through the west and captured dramatic nature scenes such as this one, depicting the Upper Sacramento river with its towering trees. His paintings are in many superb institutional and private collections around the world. Paintings by Schafer in this size range have brought from $15,000 to $26,000 recently at auction, which is wholesale pricing (see photos) so we feel ours is a fair price. The painting measures an impressive 65" x 44.5" in its ornate gold wooden frame; the canvas size is 50" x 30". It has some professional and unobtrusive inpainting, not unusual for a painting of its age.

 

 

Bio as featured in AskArt: 

 

The following biography is from the artist's web site and reprinted with the permission of Jerome H. Saltzer.

 

"Frederick Ferdinand Schafer was born in Braunschweig, Germany, on August 16, 839. He emigrated to the United States in 1876, at the age of 37, where he created some 500 paintings of western American landscapes, and he died in Oakland, California, on July 18, 1927.


He is well known within a community of collectors of and dealers in western art, mostly in California and the Pacific Northwest. Schafer's training in Germany is unknown. His work resembles that of the Düsseldorf school and contemporary newspaper writers sometimes suggested a connection. He had studios in San Francisco from 1880 through 1886 and in his homes in Alameda and Oakland from 1887 until his death.


Schafer's overall style is that of the nineteenth-century American realist landscape tradition, taking maximum advantage of the dramatic western American landscape and with a strong element of naturalism--a preference to capture the impression of an object such as a tree rather than to provide photographic detail of it.

 

Many of Schafer's canvases have a dramatic appearance, arising from use of large areas of intense, saturated color and contrasting light, but stopping well short of the awesome and melodramatic (sometimes called "sublime'') effects found in canvases of Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Edwin Church.

 

Schafer usually varies the level of control of the brush greatly within a single picture. Background mountains, especially foothills and intermediate ranges, may be shapes developed with only a few wide brushstrokes, middle and foreground components are substantially more controlled, and features that draw the attention of the eye, such as a campfire, tepee, or person's face, are often more controlled than their surroundings.

 

Schafer's work is held in these public collections: Alameda (California) Free Library, Art Museum of Greater Victoria (British Columbia), Bancroft Library (Honeyman collection), British Columbia Archives, California Historical Society, Craigdarroch Castle (British Columbia), Crocker Art Museum, Hoover Institution, Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Monterey State Historic Park, Museum of Church History and Art (Salt Lake City), The Oakland Museum of California, Seattle Art Museum, Shasta (California) State Historic Park, Society of California Pioneers, Sonoma County (California) Museum (Hart collection), and the Yosemite National Park Museum." October 27, 1998


1996, 1998 by Jerome H. Saltzer. All rights reserved."