Dennis Sheehan (American. b. 1950). Oil on canvas painting titled “New Dawn,” depicting a early morning sunrise on a darkened landscape. Signed along the lower left. Provenance: Art Resources Gallery, Minnesota; Private Collection, Minnesota. Born in Boston in 1950, Sheehan has works in major public & private collections including the White House. He paints in the Barbizon style with remarkable authority & faithful adherence to his 19th century precursors. In the tradition of the tonalist painters, Sheehan creates landscapes of mood, affected by nature’s changing seasons. Sheehan’s style is greatly influenced by his nineteenth-century-predecessor George Inness. Like Inness, whose influence is consciously acknowledged, Sheehan employs the dark palette and thickly pigmented surfaces of the French Barbizon School. Maintaining a muted tonalist chromatic scheme, Sheehan, like Inness before him, has the temerity to eschew picturesque scenery in the interest of evoking atmospherics and the appearance of the natural world as it is observed. Yet, also like Inness, Sheehan’s paintings are produced in the studio. His work is the product of the conscious distillation of prior imagery ranging from the American Barbizon to the abstractions of Franz Kline. Sight; height: 11 1/2 in x width: 15 1/2 in. Framed; height: 14 1/2 in x width: 18 1/2 in.