Guy Carleton Wiggins (1883-1962)
Guy Wiggins was born in Lyme, Conn., and was educated there at his father’s (John Carleton Wiggins) art school. Before he settled on a career as a painter, the younger Wiggins worked with the Foreign Service. He would paint local scenes wherever he was posted. After taking an early retirement from the job, Wiggins entered the Art Students League in New York, followed by a course of study in the artists colony of Old Lyme. Wiggins is best known for his Impressionistic paintings of New York in the snow, as well as for his renderings of Connecticut landscapes.
Information courtesy of Morphy Auctions, December 2007
At the age of twenty, Guy Carleton Wiggins was the youngest artist to be represented in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Guy Wiggins was born in Brooklyn and continued his father Carleton Wiggins’s legacy of landscape painting. Unlike his father, however, Guy Wiggins studied with artists in the Old Lyme Colony who were developing their own style of Impressionism, fusing the French tradition with emerging American techniques. Guy Wiggins continued to paint in the Impressionist style even after the movement was eclipsed by Realism. Union Square, Winter is a choice example of the artist’s trademark scenes of New York in near blizzard conditions.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, November, 2008