Description: This is a fantastic and expressive Fine Antique Impressionist ORIENTALIST Still Life Oil Painting on Canvas, by the renowned Polish - American Orientalist painter, educator and illustrator, Stan Pociecha Poray (1888 - 1948.) This artwork depicts an Arabesque or Indian Mughal-inspired still life scene, with gilded brocade fabrics, Near Eastern inspired wine or tea vessels, and a dark green elephant figurine, possibly made of jade, featured in the center of the scene. This artwork is rendered in lush and gorgeous depth and deep colorful hues, creating an exotic and enchanting scene for the outside viewer. Signed: "Stan Pociecha Poray" in the lower right corner. Additionally, this artwork is signed and titled on the verso of the canvas: "Stan Pociecha Poray...Green Elephant." This piece likely dates to the 1930's. Approximately 20 x 25 inches. Good overall condition for nearly a century of age and storage, with a few small scuffs, tiny tears to the canvas, areas of paint loss, and subtle edge wear throughout (please see photos carefully.) Acquired from an old Los Angeles, California collection. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About the Artist: Stan Poray Born: 1888 - Krakow, PolandDied: 1948 - New York CityKnown for: Landscape, still life, illustratorName variants: Stanislaus "Stan" Pociecha Poray Stan Poray (1888 - 1948) was active/lived in California / Poland. Stan Poray is known for Landscape, still life, illustrator. Biography from Crocker Art Museum StorePainter, illustrator, teacher. Born of noble birth in Krakow, Poland on April 10, 1888.Stan Foray was raised in an atmosphere of wealth and art. His father, Count Michael Poray, was an established landscape painter in his native city. The younger Foray studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and in Paris. He lived in Moscow and Siberia where he was art director of the First Art Theatre in Tomsk in 1918. Uprooted by the Russian Revolution, he decamped to the Orient where for three years he painted the Imperial family and other notables. After settling in Los Angeles in 1921, he soon became active in the local art world. The interior of his home, which he both designed and built, was a miniature reproduction of a Japanese temple. During his early years in California he painted landscapes, coastals, the missions, and nocturnes; however, later in life he specialized in still lifes. Evidenced in his painting is his study of ancient Chinese culture, philosphy, and art. His works were reproduced in the Los Angeles Times (12-2-1928) and Art Digest (11-1-1947). Poray was a resident of Los Angeles at the time of his death at the airport in NYC on Oct. 18, 1948. Member: Calif. Art Club; San Diego Art Guild; Société des Artistes Polonais (Paris); LAAA; Painters and Sculptors of LA. Exh: Springville (UT) Museum, 1929; Stendahl Gallery (LA), 1929, 1931, 1938 (solos); Hollywood Riviera Club, 1936; GGIE, 1939. In: Commercial Club (LA); Jonathan Club (LA); Gardena (CA) High School; Radcliffe College; Detroit Inst. of Art; Fogg Museum (Harvard); LACMA. AAA 1931-33; CSL; Ben; WWPC 1947; Sam; SCA; AAW; WWAA 1936-53 (obit). Stan Poray Stanislaus Pociecha Poray (1888 –1948) was a Polish-American artist, noted for his orientalist landscapes and still lifes. Born to wealthy Count Michael Poray in Kraków, he studied at the Polish Academy of Fine Arts and later in Paris. He travelled widely in Russia, marrying Maria Krzyzanowska in Riga, Latvia before moving to Moscow and later Tomsk where he became art director of the First Art Theater in 1918. Fleeing the Russian Revolution, the couple passed through Vladivostok and then lived in Japan for three years where he painted the Imperial family. They then immigrated to the United States and settled in Hollywood, Los Angeles in 1921 in a reproduction of a Japanese temple at 1421 El Centro Ave, just blocks from the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Pantages Theater. Poray had numerous solo art shows over the next 27 years, including at the Springville Museum in Utah in 1929, several different shows at the Stendhal Galleries, the Upstairs Art Gallery in Hollywood, and was still headlining exhibitions at the Ebell Club the year of his death. On October 18, 1948, following a three-month trip to show his art in Caracas, Venezuela, Poray died at a New York City airport on his way back to Los Angeles. A rosary and mass were said for him in Los Angeles Polish churches, and he was buried at nearby Holy Cross Cemetery. Stanislaus Pociecha Poray(1888-1948) Stanislaus Pociecha Poray was born in Krakow, Poland on April 10, 1888.Stan Poray was raised in an atmosphere of wealth and art. His father, Count Michael Poray, was an established landscape painter. The younger Poray studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and in Paris. He lived in Moscow and Siberia where he was art director of the First Art Theatre in Tomsk in 1918. Uprooted by the Russian Revolution, he decamped to Eastern Asia where for three years he painted the Imperial family and other notables. After settling in Los Angeles in 1921, he soon became active in the local art world. The interior of his home, which he both designed and built, was a miniature reproduction of a Japanese temple. During his early years in California, he painted landscapes, coastals, the missions, and nocturnes; however, later in life he specialized in still lifes. Evidenced in his painting is his study of ancient Chinese culture, philosphy, and art. Poray was a resident of Los Angeles at the time of his death at the airport in NYC on Oct. 18, 1948.His works were reproduced in the Los Angeles Times (12-2-1928) and Art Digest (11-1-1947).Member: Calif. Art Club; San Diego Art Guild; Société des Artistes Polonais (Paris); LAAA; Painters and Sculptors of LA. Exh: Springville (UT) Museum, 1929; Stendahl Gallery (LA), 1929, 1931, 1938 (solos); Hollywood Riviera Club, 1936; GGIE, 1939. In: Commercial Club (LA); Jonathan Club (LA); Gardena (CA) High School; Radcliffe College; Detroit Inst. of Art; Fogg Museum (Harvard); LACMA. AAA 1931-33; CSL; Ben; WWPC 1947; Sam; SCA; AAW; WWAA 1936-53 (obit). Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art The Orient—including present-day Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa—exerted its allure on the Western artist’s imagination centuries prior to the turn of the nineteenth century. Figures in Middle Eastern dress appear in Renaissance and Baroque works by such artists as Bellini, Veronese, and Rembrandt, and the opulent eroticism of harem scenes appealed to the French Rococo aesthetic. Until this point, however, Europeans had minimal contact with the East, usually through trade and intermittent military campaigns. In 1798, a French army led by General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and occupied the country until 1801. The European presence in Egypt attracted Western travelers to the Near and Middle East, many of whom captured their impressions in paint or print. In 1809, the French government published the first installment of the twenty-four-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809–22), illustrating the topography, architecture, monuments, natural life, and population of Egypt. The Description de l’Égypte was the most influential of many works that aimed to document the culture of this region, and it had a profound effect on French architecture and decorative arts of the period, as evidenced in the dominance of Egyptian motifs in the Empire style.Some of the first nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings were intended as propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule. Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835)—a pupil of Jacques Louis David and a history painter in Napoleon’s employ who never traveled to the Near East himself—conveys this idea in Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa (1804; Musée du Louvre, Paris), featuring an Eastern architectural setting and figures in exotic dress. A propagandizing work, it depicts the general’s visit to plague-afflicted prisoners during the siege of Jaffa. Recalling both Christian imagery and the divine touch of kings, Gros depicts Napoleon touching an inmate, who gestures in incredulity. Proponents of the Romantic movement, such as Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), also avidly took up themes of violence and cruelty in Oriental subjects. Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios (1824) and Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28; both Louvre) embody in images of war and destruction the Romantic themes of human pathos, uncontrollable force, and emotional extremes. The emphasis on military brutality in many Oriental subjects by Western artists reflects ongoing conflicts throughout the century: the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), the conquest of Algeria by the French in the 1830s, and the Crimean War (1853–56).While many Europeans relied on published travelogues and officially sanctioned literature like the Description de l’Égypte for their impressions of the Near East, many artists, including Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856), Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803–1860), and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), made one or more journeys to the region. Genre painting, the prevalent form of Orientalist art in the nineteenth century, was greatly influenced by artists’ direct experience of everyday life in Near Eastern cities and settlements. Gérôme popularized the theme of the bashi-bazouk, or Turkish mercenary soldier, often depicted in routine activities or at leisure, as in a canvas by Charles Bargue (1825/26–1883). For Decamps, whose late career was shaped by the year he spent in Asia Minor (1828–29), depictions of military life elevated genre subjects to the grandeur of history painting. These artists and their contemporaries also produced scenes of quiet domesticity, maternity—as in Chassériau’s Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine —and religious piety, seen in Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque.Occasionally, the Near Eastern setting provided a backdrop for religious works with Christian themes. This approach appealed particularly to British artists, as the explicitness of detail encouraged in the Orientalist style upheld the Protestant necessity for iconographic clarity and fidelity to nature in religious art. From his sojourn in Palestine in the 1850s, William Holman Hunt produced paintings such as The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (1854–55; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), which uses an Orientalist setting, and The Scapegoat (1854–55; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), a Christian allegory set in the Palestinian landscape.Some of the most popular Orientalist genre scenes—and the ones most influential in shaping Western aesthetics—depict harems. Probably denied entrance to authentic seraglios, male artists relied largely on hearsay and imagination, populating opulently decorated interiors with luxuriant odalisques, or female slaves or concubines (many with Western features), reclining in the nude or in Oriental dress. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) never traveled to the East but used the harem setting to conjure an erotic ideal in his voluptuous odalisques. Beyond their implicit eroticism, harem scenes evoked a sense of cultivated beauty and pampered isolation to which many Westerners aspired. The taste for Orientalism further manifested itself in Eastern architectural motifs, furniture, decorative arts, and textiles, which were increasingly sought after by a European elite. Proponents of the Aesthetic movement in Great Britain (1860s–80s), who collectively advocated an aesthetic of beauty for its own sake and valued form over content in art, took particular inspiration from Oriental interiors. This taste is exemplified in the Arab Hall (1877–79) in the London home of artist Frederic Leighton (1830–1896): glittering with mosaic tiles collected from Leighton’s journeys to the East, it served as a gathering place for like-minded aesthetes.The potency of Orientalist images remained undiminished for many artists into the twentieth century, including Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka, all of whom took up Orientalist themes.
Price: 1350 USD
Location: Orange, California
End Time: 2025-01-11T03:37:36.000Z
Shipping Cost: N/A USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Artist: Stan Poray
Unit of Sale: Single Piece
Signed By: Stan Poray
Size: Medium
Signed: Yes
Period: Art Deco (1920-1940)
Title: "Green Elephant"
Material: Canvas, Oil
Region of Origin: California, USA
Framing: Unframed
Subject: Africa, Animal Head, Community Life, Elephant, Figures, Flowers, India, Silhouettes, Statue, Still Life
Type: Painting
Year of Production: 1930
Original/Licensed Reproduction: Original
Item Height: 20 in
Theme: Animals, Architecture, Art, Continents & Countries, Cultures & Ethnicities, Events & Festivals, Exhibitions, Fashion, Food & Drink, History
Style: Impressionism, Islamic, Modernism, Still Life, Orientalism
Features: One of a Kind (OOAK)
Production Technique: Oil Painting
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Item Width: 25 in
Handmade: Yes
Time Period Produced: 1925-1949