Peter Sculthorpe 2024

2005 I first met Peter nineteen years ago at the US Artists show, a high-end art venue run by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I was exhibiting paintings by the “New Hope School” artists that I personally collect, and my gallery specializes in. It was also the year I launched my book, “New Hope for American Art.” Coincidentally, earlier that same year I had purchased a Sculthorpe watercolor at auction. At that point I was familiar with his name but didn’t knowmuch about his work other than that I loved the one I had just bought. When Peter came to my booth at US Artists and introduced himself as an artist and admirer of the Pennsylvania Impressionists we had on display, I informed him that I was a fan of his work and an aspiring Sculthorpe collector. Shortly after that introduction, Peter’s wife, Sharon, sent me several past exhibition brochures and photos of his work.....I took the bait and was hooked! 2009 I was feeling somewhat flush and in the buying mood, so I called Peter. He invited me to his studio and home in Rockland, Delaware, only several miles from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, home of the Wyeths. After a tour of the studio and a nice lunch, I did what I seem to do best — I bought everything! If it was something created by Peter and it wasn’t on the short list of art with a personal attachment to him or Sharon, it was included in my deal. Paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. For nearly a decade and a half, I have been selling these Sculthorpes in my New Jersey and Palm Beach galleries, as well as enjoying some of my favorites in the places where I live. Having had a great deal of success selling these works to collectors from all over the globe, I was running out of Sculthorpes. 2019 Ten years had gone by so I reached out to Peter to see if enough time passed and he had amassed another large group of his art for me to acquire. While some plein-air painters like Edward Redfield could whip out a masterpiece in a day, artists like Daniel Garber, who were much more meticulous, took weeks, or sometimes months to complete a painting. Peter’s intricate attention to every minute detail in his work, makes these gems extremely time consuming to create. Peter told me he’d never made a sale nearly as large as our last deal in 2009 and that the timing of it had been perfect for him. After the sale, he took some time to “smell the roses,” riding his bike and enjoying life — the things I had mentioned years earlier in my pitch as some perks of “selling it all.” Thanks to taking my advice, he wasn’t yet ready for deal #2 Introduction by Jim Alterman 3