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