Winter Painting by Guy Wiggins American Impressionist

Guy C. Wiggins (1883-1962) received his early education in England where he traveled with his family as a boy. His father, Carleton Wiggins, was an American artist who worked in the Barbizon, his subjects were mostly pastoral - sheep in a meadow.
Young Guy Wiggins studied both French traditions and new American techniques, but became strongly attracted to Impressionism.
Wiggins was very successful in his early career. The Metropolitan Museum had his painting in the permanent collection when he was 20 years old. In 1917 the young artist received the prestigious Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago. The years before World War I Wiggins was extremely busy working on commissions in England and exhibiting in Old Lyme, CT.

Union Square, Winter

He talked about his New York snow scenes in an interview in 1924:

One cold, blustering, snowy winter day (1912) I was in my New York studio trying to paint a summer landscape. Things wouldn't go right, and I sat idly looking out of a window at nothing. Suddenly I saw what was before me---an elevated railroad track, with a train dashing madly through the whirling blizzard-like snow that made hazy and indistinct the row of buildings on the far side of the street ("Metropolitan Tower, 1912" Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY). Well, when I gave an exhibition a short time afterward . . . the winter canvases were sold before anything else. In a week, so to say, I was established as a painter of city winter scenes, and I found it profitable.

5th Avenue Storm

Winter at the Plaza

Winter on the Avenue at 42nd Street

Winter Night in New York

Christmas Eve, 1959

City Hall Park, New York

Heckscher Tower

Madison Avenue

The New York Stock Exchange

Union Square, Winter

Washington's Birthday on Wall Street

A New England Farm in Winter

5th Avenue Winter

Washington Square

He talked about his New York snow scenes in an interview in 1924:

One cold, blustering, snowy winter day (1912) I was in my New York studio trying to paint a summer landscape. Things wouldn't go right, and I sat idly looking out of a window at nothing. Suddenly I saw what was before me---an elevated railroad track, with a train dashing madly through the whirling blizzard-like snow that made hazy and indistinct the row of buildings on the far side of the street ("Metropolitan Tower, 1912" Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY). Well, when I gave an exhibition a short time afterward . . . the winter canvases were sold before anything else. In a week, so to say, I was established as a painter of city winter scenes, and I found it profitable.