February 19 - May 1, 2026
Installation Views | Text | For availability and pricing, call 212-581-1657.
Installation Views
D. Wigmore Fine Art presents Florida Dreaming, a selection of 25 paintings and works on paper by twelve artists showing their creative responses to Florida and the seaside. The paintings in our exhibition are by Sally Michel (1902-2003), Doris Lee (1904-1983), Virginia Berresford (1904-1995), Arnold Blanch (1896-1968), Francis Chapin (1899-1965), Adolf Dehn (1895-1968), Virginia Dehn (1922-2005), Lucy L’Engle (1889-1978), Witold Gordon (1885-1968), Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), Jan Matulka (1890-1972), and Paul Sample (1896-1974).
In the 1930s through 1960s, Florida offered a tropical paradise reachable by a long car drive for New York artists. Doris Lee fell under Florida’s spell on her first visit in the 1930s and purchased a home in Key West in 1941. Doris Lee and her husband, Arnold Blanch, spent January through April each year in Florida. As a teacher at New York’s Art Students League, Arnold Blanch was invited to teach at art schools across Florida. Birds, fishermen and bathers by Blanch and Lee add joy to this exhibition.
Sally Michel and her husband Milton Avery spent their first winter in Florida as Bok Fellows at the Maitland Research Studio, near Orlando. The couple spent two winters there in 1950 and 1951. Their time at the Research Studio overlapped with Doris Lee and Arnold Blanch and the two artist couples developed a friendship that brought the Averys to Woodstock in the summer. Our exhibition includes four paintings and a work on paper that were inspired by the environs of Orlando by Sally Michel.
Watercolors by Virginia Berresford reflect her interest in the intense light and shadow found in Florida’s exotic flora and fauna. Berresford wintered in Florida from 1934 to 1950 in Miami. During World War II, Berresford and her husband were stationed at Fort Taylor in Key West. Berresford credited Florida for moving her beyond the purity of Precisionism into a rich and layered style using watercolors and pastels.
Our exhibition includes other artists who came to Florida from the 1930s through the 1960s. Lucy L’Engle, one of Provincetown’s modernists, painted in St. Augustine. Reginald Marsh regularly visited Ormond Beach as his father, the artist Frederick Dana Marsh, built a home there in his retirement. In front of the home’s modern architecture, the father and son installed carousel horses they rescued from the town dump and painted white. Our 1939 watercolor of the horses has a Surrealist feel, yet the photographs in the artist’s archive show the scene to be real. Adolf Dehn taught every winter at the Norton Gallery School of Art in Palm Beach from 1941 to 1961. At the end of his teaching, Dehn would head to Key West to meet fellow Woodstock artists including Doris Lee and Arnold Blanch. In the late 1940s, Adolf Dehn brought his new wife, artist Virginia Dehn, who also painted the local scenery. Paul Sample (1896-1974) visited Florida on a NASA commission at Cape Kennedy in 1964 then toured the state, ending in Key West.
Real estate development and tourism opened the way for artists to find Florida a place of interest. However, real advancement of Florida’s culture and artistic growth can be credited to the businessmen who developed railroads, steamship service, and hotels. These builders of Florida were Henry Morrison Flagler, George Merrick, Addison Mizner, and John Ringling. The infrastructure they built established essential services and later with the technological developments made during World War II, tropical living became comfortable.