Reynolds Beal

Etcher-painter Reynolds Beal is considered by many to be one of the most playful Chagall-like American post-impressionist painters. His most desirable subjects include Provincetown water views and circus and beach scenes that are animated with animals and human figures.

Beal was born to wealth in NYC October 11, 1867. He showed artistic ability from an early age. He first studied at Cornell University (naval architecture). However, once he decided to become an artist, he studied with William Merritt Chase in Shinnecock, LI in the 1890s and then studied in Europe with Henry Ward Ranger and spent many months painting in Madrid. He traveled and painted with Childe Hassam, his brother Gifford Beal, Henry W. Ranger and H. Dudley Murphy.

Living and working in and around Rockport and Gloucester, Beal’s playful, sparkling, fun-filled canvases and drawings of marine and boating subjects became popular by 1895 and he was known as an experimental Modernist by 1915. Beal became renown for his canvases of boats, harbors, circuses, beaches and landscapes.  In 1919, he, Glackens and Hassam were chosen to exhibit at the Luxembourg in Paris (a great honor at the time) and in America he showed at the Clauson Gallery (NYC) and Kraushaar Gallery (NYC). He was an active participant at the Salmagundi Club, Lotus Club, Century Club, National Academy of Design and the American Water Color Society. The progressive Beal helped to found the Society of Independent Artists and the New Society of Artists with Bellows, Hassam, Sloan, Glackens and Prendergast.

Illness during the late 1920s prevented Beal to paint in oil as spontaneously as he would have liked and his work became less prolific, but he did paint in Key West, Provincetown, Rockport, Gloucester, Wellfleet and Atlantic City. By the time he died in1951, he was considered one of the finest painters of the American scene. Today he is highly sought after and his canvases have reached multi-hundreds of thousands of dollars in art galleries throughout the U.S.  His most popular subjects include the beach, the circus and boating scenes.