Louis Bosa (1905-1981) American, Oil on Canvas. Untitled. Duck scene. Depicting a duck head on the ground. Signed in the lower left.  Proceeds from this sale will benefit students at the Ringling College of Art & Design.

Overall Size: 15 x 19 in. 

Sight Size: 7 1/2 x 11 1/4 in. 

Frame Thickness: 1 1/2 in. 

#8160 . 

Born in a small town near Venice, Italy, Louis Bosa became a genre, figure, and landscape painter who exhibited widely, and was also a much-respected art teacher.  Amidst the growing trends of modernism, especially Abstract Expressionism, he kept to his own unique style of apolitical, witty character studies and subjects of humor and human pathos.   For art historians, his work has been difficult to categorize, which has led to him getting less attention than many of his contemporaries, especially those who had sophisticated public-relations machines.  Also, he was such a unique character---ever telling jokes and far-fetched stories---that the focus on him tended to be on his quirky personality rather than the seriousness of his art.

Bosa showed early art talent and interest, and began to do figure paintings, using his family as models, by the age of ten.  When he was fifteen years old, he enrolled in Venice at the Academia delle Belle Arti, and between 1923 and 1924, emigrated to Hamilton, Canada where a brother had preceded him and was working in a steel mill. 

However, not wanting to become a steel worker as his family was urging him to do, Louis Bosa moved to Buffalo, New York to join an aunt and uncle. There he met his future wife, Theresa Krakowska, and shortly after moved to New York City to pursue art studies.  He took various odd jobs to support himself, and began to do fine-art painting regularly, fortified by his studies at the Art Students League whose Director was the Social-Realist painter John Sloan.  Sloan's painting style and subject matter had an ongoing influence on Bosa.

A big boost came in 1944 when he won a $1,500 prize for painting from the Pepsi-Cola Company.  He also made product endorsements such as for Grumbacher paints.  In 1938, he won the first award that brought him much attention, the John Wanamaker Prize at an outdoor exhibition in Washington Square.  He was awarded the Altman Prize at the National Academy of Design, but that was withdrawn when it was discovered that he was not American born.

In the 1930s, the Bosa purchased a dilapidated cabin, built 1730, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the cabin, named Casa Bosa, was their summer home for many years and after retirement, their permanent home.  In an addition to the original structure, Bosa created a room resembling a chapel in which he housed small sculptures that he had made and Renaissance religious sculptures that he had collected.

Bosa was an instructor for many years, including at the Art Students League in New York City, the Cape Ann School at Rockport, Massachusetts, and the Cleveland Institute of Art. (Askart)