Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection

Acquisitions Wishlist

The following works are currently available for sale and sought by the Friends for acquisition into the collection. We are currently seeking interested donors willing to help with sponsorship of these works. Please contact us here if you wish to donate or learn more. Sponsored works are marked "Aquired" as funding goals are reached.

Attributed to Jacob Caleb Ward (1809 - 1891)

Scene on the Susquehanna

oil on canvas in original frame

c.1833, 27 x 41 inches

Still need to raise: $50,000

Ward was a highly regarded contemporary of Thomas Cole and his rare works have often been misattributed to Cole. This large dramatic work shows a group of African American or Native American workers gathered at a timber cutting camp along the river.

Daniel Garber (1880 - 1958)

The Susquehanna

oil on canvas, 1902

12 x 16 inches

Still need to raise: $87,000

Garber was a founder of the New Hope School of American Impressionism. This is a rare early work and one of just 3 known Susquehanna works he painted.

Franz Kline (1910 - 1962)

PA Street Scene (Pennsylvania Mining Town)

oil on canvas, 1947

15 x 19 inches

Pennsylvania Landscape

ink and pastel on paper, 1944

8.75 x 11.75 inches

Lehigh River

oil on canvas, 1944

20.25 x 26.25 inches

These three works are being offered as a group for sale by a private collector. Still need to raise: $95,000

Born in the Susquehanna coal town of Wilkes-Barre, Franz Kline was a pivotal figure in American modernism and the formation of a school of American Abstract Expressionism. Early in his career throughout the 1940s, Kline produced representational, muscular drawings and oil studies of the local industrial landscape, focusing specifically on the skeletal shapes of coal breakers and railroad trestles. When Kline ultimately pivoted to his signature monumental black-and-white Abstract Expressionist canvases in the late 1940s and 1950s, his stark, colliding calligraphic strokes remained conceptually tied to these early memories—a connection he codified by naming his non-objective paintings after Susquehanna Valley coal communities like Shenandoah (1956), Luzerne (1956), Pittston (1958), and the Whitney Museum of American Art's iconic Mahoning (1956). This rare group of early works from the 1940s shows the progression of his style towards abstraction.

Dox Thrash (1893 - 1965)

Coal Breaker

lithograph, 1943

9.7 x 6.8 inches

Still need to raise: $14,400

Leveraging his position at the racially integrated Philadelphia WPA Fine Print Workshop, African American master printmaker Dox Thrash (1893-1965) co-invented the groundbreaking carborundum method. In Coal Breaker, Thrash utilized the rich, velvety blacks and textured highlights inherent to this newly pioneered process to emphasize the monumental, skeletal geometry of the processing facilities towering over the valley floor.