With a backdrop of 19th and early 20th century paintings gathered by Objects and Images Gallery, combined with works lent from several villagers’ private collections, villager and art historian Jayne Warman painted a magnificent landscape of Bronxville’s early art and its ever-increasing value in the current market in the first gallery event in the spring of 2000. Ms. Warman noted that the earliest known Bronxville artist was WILLIAM R. HAMILTON (1795-1879), a Scotsman by birth who is best know as a portraitist. He painted the individual likenesses of one of Bronxville’s first families, the Mastertons, in formal settings as well as in bucolic scenes such as Masterton’s at Play Along the Bronx River. Other artists featured in the exhibit included GEORGE SMILLIE, OTTO BACHER and WILL HICOK LOW, the latter probably the most famous of the colony’s residents. “They were well-established painters with various aesthetic concerns, all basically conservative and seeking a quiet, relaxed but elegant life within easy reach of Manhattan,” she said.
