The Winter Art Show

It has been seven years since we began publishing an annual portfolio of our discoveries of little-known paintings that had impressed us both as art and as historical documents. The gallery offered here has been assembled from a variety of sources. Sanford Smith’s always impressive Fall Antiques Show in New York, for instance, yielded up the wonderful scene below of two men staring in evident stupefaction at their heroic cow, and the father of a soldier serving in the Persian Gulf sent us a fine Peale portrait of his ancestor William Eaton, who also saw action in the Middle East. Others of these paintings were briefly visible recently at auction houses before passing into private hands. Each of them, we believe, has something valuable to say about what Americans felt, did, and saw in the light of other days.