Stokely Webster

Art Brokerage: Stokely Webster American Artist: b. 1912-2001. Stokely Webster (1912 – 2001) was best known as an American impressionist painter who studied in Paris. His paintings can be found in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the White House, Gracie Mansion in New York, the Senate Office Building, and the Museum of the City of New York. In 1936 he studied for six months with Robert Henri's disciple Wayman Adams, learning portrait painting and landscape technique, which combined the high-valued colors of impressionism with the methods of Henri and John Singer Sargent. He returned to painting in 1948, having sublet a spacious studio, formerly owned by George Luks, in Manhattan. A fire ravaged this building four years later, however, destroying more than sixty of his canvases and cheating Webster of his successful re-entry into the city's art world. The incident prompted him to relocate to Huntington, Long Island, where he became involved as a designer, and then president, of a gyroscope manufacturing company. Webster's creative inclinations eventually lured him back into active painting, and the decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw him creating both landscapes and figural studies and exhibiting that work internationally in an array of salons and galleries. During this time, Webster's paintings were acquired by, or donated to, museums in the United States. During the 1960s, he painted many portraits of his wife, Iva, as well as his daughter, Stephanie (dancer, who later married novelist Martin Brooks), and his granddaughter, Kathryn (novelist and photographer K. S. Brooks). Webster died in 2001, in Southport, Connecticut. Listings wanted.