The Taber Museum is pleased to announce the acquisition of an original watercolor study by David Armstrong. The study features a ‘Jack-in-the-Pulpit,’ a plant seen throughout the eastern seaboard. Several studies of the Jack itself are situated among the main plant, flanked by a fern frond in the background. This was created in June 1996 according to the original invoice/receipt found on the reverse. This study was obtained with the cooperation of Callahan’s Antiquities, Montoursville.
David Armstrong remains one of the best known artists of the twentieth century, a contemporary and colleague of Andrew Wyeth, Bob Timberlake and Eric Sloane.
David Armstrong grew up on a Connecticut family farm in 1947. On the farm, he developed a reverence for the earth and a desire to capture it in his paintings. He studied his craft at the Taft School, the Showhegan School of painting and sculpture, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, and Indiana University. Eric Sloane mentored David throughout most of his career. In 1976, David served as an assistant to Sloane for Sloane’s panoramic mural in the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.
David Armstrong was associated with the Hammer Galleries in New York City. Among the many exhibitions mounted, there was a two-artist exhibition featuring John Denver and David to benefit the Windstar Foundation (promotes children’s cancer research)(1987), “Realism: A Continuing American Tradition,” with the above-mentioned colleagues; and in 1990, an exhibition to benefit The American Farmland Trust Organization, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving agricultural resources.
Armstrong relocated to Lycoming County near Unityville and continued to paint fields, farms and woods. Many of them were located in the rural landscape of the County, reflecting the beauty of nature, farmland of America, and the simplicity of country living. He died prematurely in his early fifties in 1998.
The purchase was made possible through a legacy of the estate of Charlie Paris with the knowledge of his sons Greg and Jeff Paris.