NEWSLETTER 2 - MARCH 2016

The F.B. Valentine website (fbvalentine.org) has added twenty four additional water color paintings and two drawings since the first newsletter in December 2015.  There are now 42 paintings provided by friends and family.  One interesting story involves Greg Dake Jr. and his wife Julia.  It was Julia whose follow-up found the beautiful “Oak at the Cross Roads” painting in the basement of the Hamburg Charlotte Ave. Elementary when Initial reports indicated the picture had been destroyed when the school experienced flooding some years ago.   Another set of paintings were found through Daniel Kraft, my father’s nephew, living in Orchard Park, New York, and his niece, Dianna Bodden, living in Georgia.  These pictures included paintings of the Buffalo waterfront, Buffalo’s Delaware Park, urban scenes from Buffalo, and the Buffalo Yacht Club.  In addition Meibohm Fine Arts of East Aurora, N. Y. provided a photo of a beautiful painting of the Otte’s Farm on Route 219 going south out of Hamburg toward Boston, N.Y..   

 

Maggie MacTiernan, my niece, the website developer, has placed these additional paintings on the website and divided the paintings into several categories (landscapes, Buffalo waterfront, seascape from Rockport and Cape Ann, MA, sketches, and miscellaneous). She will soon be adding a set of Valentine Family Christmas cards. 

 

If you know of anyone who has or might know the whereabouts of paintings by F.B. Valentine, please contact me at cvalentine@mindspring.com.

 

Have a great spring.   Carl Valentine

                     

NEWSLETTER 1 – DECEMBER 2015

The F. B. Valentine website is up and getting better.  The website, fbvalentine.org, 

was developed by Maggie MacTiernan in consultation with me.  My father was a 

well known artist and teacher in Western New York who won many awards for his 

landscapes and waterscapes from about 1920 when he completed study at Yale 

Art School until his death in 1985.  My wife, Jane, and I recently took a trip to 

Western New York to see if we could find some of his work that could be 

photographed for the website.   The first stop was the Burchfield Penney Art 

Center located on the University of Buffalo campus.  Nancy Weekly, Head of 

Collections and Curator, had indicated they had two of Dad’s paintings in their 

archives and would be happy to take photos of the work for the website. She has 

been kind enough to send photos of Dad’s paintings that will be incorporated in 

the website by the first of the year.   

 

We next visited the new Waterfront Memories & More museum in Mutual 

Riverfront Park located in South Buffalo.  We found eleven of Dad’s watercolors of 

the Buffalo waterfront when it was alive with lake freighters and tug boats, grain 

elevators, steel mills, local fishermen and more.  Ms Manos, a neighbor of my 

father’s in Hamburg, New York, recently donated these paintings to the museum.  

The pictures had hung on the walls of her husband’s South Buffalo restaurant for 

years.  Next stop was Meibohm Fine Arts in East Aurora, New York.  The Meibohm 

gallery both framed and showed Dad’s work.  We found they had three pieces of 

Dad’s work, a New York City cityscape completed when Dad was living in NYC, a 

landscape of a Buffalo Park, and Kelley’s Corner, a picture of the neighborhood 

where he grew up, Kelly’s Corner on Vermont Street near the Peace Bridge.  Jane 

bought this picture for me as a birthday present.

 

We completed our Buffalo trip with a visit to my nephew’s home in Hamburg, 

New York and asked him to photograph the two pictures he had and I made the 

same request of my sister who has several of Dad’s pictures in her home.   

There are currently 19 pictures on the website and as new materials are found 

the number will grow.  If you know of anyone who has or might know the 

whereabouts of pictures painted by Francis Barker Valentine please contact me at 

cvalentine@mindspring.com.    -- Carl Valentine