SHERIDAN LORD
Landscape, June - July 1981 - 82, 1982 Oil on canvas 30 x 48 inches
Landscape, July 1973 - January 1974, 1973 Oil on canvas 44 x 62 inches
Wainscott Pond, 1973, 1973 Oil on canvas 36 x 56 inches
Landscape, Summer 1977, 1977 Oil on canvas 36 x 54 inches
Spring Landscape, January 1980, 1980 Oil on masonite 4 x 8 inches
Summer Landscape, July 1980, 1980 Oil on masonite 4 x 8 inches
Winter Landscape, February 1978, 1978 Oil on masonite 4 x 8 inches
Landscape, April - May 1976 -77 -78, 1978 Oil on canvas 25 x 38 inches
Landscape, April 1988–91, 1991 Oil on canvas 38 x 52 inches
Landscape, April–May 1971 , 1971 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches
Garden & Neighbors' House, 1991 Oil on canvas 38 x 52 inches
Still Life, January – May 1986, 1986 Oil on canvas 8 x 9 inches
Landscape, Summer 1993, 1993 Oil on canvas 33 x 47 inches
The American painter Sheridan Lord (1926-1994) created a small but distinguished body of work. His main subject was the flat landscape of Eastern Long Island not far from his home in Sagaponack. He observed the work of its farms in all seasons, and he mastered the subtly shifting moods of its vast skies. Lord’s pictures get their strength from convincing structure, and their life from suggestive brushwork, which conveys fine nuances of color and tone. When the weather was good, Lord painted outdoors, and when it was too wet or cold, he stayed indoors and painted luminous, sensitive still lifes.
Lord had a late start as a painter. He had studied literature at Yale and served in the army, then became an art student at the University of Iowa. In the 1960s he taught at the Brooklyn Museum School. After much hesitation, Lord began in 1969 to paint landscapes seriously. He made rapid progress and soon had a following among several dozen collectors in and around New York. Most of his paintings sold right away and have since remained in the families of the first owners.
Lord was a much-loved member of a small community of writers, editors, and artists on Long Island who valued his sharp critical mind and his visual gifts. He was working as a representational artist at a time when most of his artist neighbors were painting abstract works, some of them having great commercial success. Lord said he loved abstract paintings by his neighbors Jackson Pollock and James Brooks and Bradley Walker Tomlin, but about abstraction he said, “It just wasn’t something I could do. It was totally opposite.”
Lord’s work has been closely held and never widely known. His pictures were included in various group exhibitions at museums and commercial galleries, but it was not until 1995—a year after his death at 68—that he was the subject of a retrospective. Held at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY, the show made it clear that Lord deserves to rank, along with Jane Wilson and Fairfield Porter, among the most accomplished realist painters of his time and place.
John Walsh, 12/28/15
John Walsh, is Director Emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He was a paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught history of art courses at Columbia, Harvard, and more recently at Yale