Loran F. Wilford (1892-1972) American, Landscape Watercolor on Paper. Sweeping hills in the distance beneath a turbulent sky, with sharp clear trees in the foreground juxtaposed against the misty background. Signed bottom right. Label from the Frank Oehlschlaeger Gallery on the back includes title: "Distant Hills." 

Overall Size: 18 x 22 in. 

Sight Size: 11 x 15 in. 

#8695 

Loran Frederick Wilford was born in Wamego, Kansas in 1892, and demonstrated a gift for art by the time he was five. In 1910 Wilford got a job at the Kansas City Star doing lettering and small drawings for advertisements and began taking art classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. The Star quickly recognized his skill as a rapid sketch artist, adopting many of his techniques for future layout designs. William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of the Star, art collector, and founder of Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, urged Wilford to try his hand as a freelance artist in the competitive environment of New York City. In 1920 Wilford married and had a daughter, taking them with him in 1922 when he moved to Manhattan with no work prospects and a single portfolio. Over the next ten years Wilford developed a reputation as one of America’s outstanding illustrators, his work shown in over 100 galleries and his illustrations appearing in magazines including, Colliers, Cosmopolitan, The Ladies Home Journal, Scribner’s, McCall’s, Century, Good Housekeeping, and The American. At a showing at the Argent Gallery in Brooklyn in 1935 he reconnected with George Pearse Ennis, who he had studied with in Kansas City, and accepted a position teaching landscape classes at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where Ennis was the head of the art faculty. Although he only taught three days a week to start, after Ennis’ tragic death in 1936 he quickly rose to become a full-time professor, remaining with the school for twenty-eight years until retiring due to health issues. Listed in Who’s Who in American Art and called the “Dean of Florida Romantic Realistic Painters,” Wilford was included in the 1955 Ringling Museums exhibit Fifty Florida Painters. In the summer of 1963, the Florida Federation of Art held a reception for Wilford as the new artist-in residence at the DeBary mansion, calling him, “a master craftsman who has been winner of the International Print Prize and shown by invitation of the Royal Watercolor Society at the Royal Academy in England…his prizes and credits could fill a printed page.” He passed away due to natural causes in 1972 in his home in Sarasota.