Paintings

Home Paintings
Post Title
Post Title
Post Title
Post Title
Image Title
Image Title
Image Title
Image Title
Samuel Edmund Oppenheim
American, 1901-1992
Portrait of a Woman with Flowers
Oil on canvas
12 by 16 in, w/ frame 19 by 23 in
Signed upper left

Inventory Number: 01720
1950-present American Figurative Period 1950-Present Portrait Impressionist/Post Impressionist

See Artist Bio below.


Samuel Edmund Oppenheim
American, 1901-1992

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, decorous nudes in a domestic interior.

But Oppenheim also painted many portraits professionally, strong in characterization and rich in painterly qualities. These masterly portraits, hanging in public and private collections throughout the United States, firmly establish his right to be considered among the foremost American portraitists. It was his popular portrait classes at the Art Students League in New York, featuring his electrifying demonstrations, that created his enduring reputation as a teacher.

Top