Anthony Thieme

Anthony Thieme was born Antonius Johannes Thieme in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on 20 February 1888. He attended a naval school in Holland as a child, then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam from about 1902 to 1904 and briefly at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague in 1905, before further training under the painter George Hacker in Dusseldorf, Germany, from 1906 to 1908 and at the Scuola di Belle Arti in Turin from 1909 to 1910. No source documents a formal degree from any of these programs.

Before turning fully to easel painting, Thieme worked as a scenic and set designer for theater companies, including work for productions in New York. He emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, settled first in Boston, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1935. He is most closely associated with Rockport, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann, where he founded and directed the Thieme School of Art beginning around 1929, and where he became a central figure of what is often called the Rockport School of American coastal painting. He also wintered in St. Augustine, Florida, and later spent time painting in Belgium, France, and Holland, exhibiting at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris around 1950 while based in Grasse. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Grace Horne Gallery in Boston in 1928, and he went on to show at the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among other venues.

Thieme died by suicide in a hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut. Wikipedia and several dealer biographies, including Questroyal Fine Art, give the date as 6 December 1954, while the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza's curatorial text gives 7 December 1954. The year, place, and manner of death are consistently documented across these sources; the exact day is not.

No exact, attributable critic quotation from a major outlet has been located for Thieme. His recognition instead comes through a long record of juried prizes and exhibition invitations during his lifetime: a First Prize in Landscape from the North Shore Art Association in 1928, the Athenaeum Prize from the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and the Delano Prize from the New York Watercolor Club, both in 1930, the Lucien Powell Citizen Jury Prize from the Los Angeles Museum and a prize from the Salmagundi Club in 1931, a gold medal for best painting in New England at the 1944 Jordan Marsh Exhibition in Boston, and an award for best marine painting at the 1949 Pan-American Art Show in Miami. Taken together, these awards and his repeated inclusion in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art point to an artist who was consistently validated by the American exhibition and prize circuit of his era, particularly for his handling of coastal light.

Thieme's auction market is regional and comparatively thin. The strongest documented result is USD 21,850 for the painting Quarry in Rockport, reported by Antiques and The Arts Weekly as the top lot of a Rockport, Massachusetts benefit auction associated with the Rockport Art Association; the sale is generally dated to mid-August 2015, though the exact day is inferred from the surrounding coverage rather than printed on the source page. One market-tracking site (Appraisily) describes a much wider recorded range, from roughly USD 10 to USD 100,000 across 647 tracked lots between 1992 and 2026, though it does not itself identify a single top result above the Rockport figure. Later sales tracked through 2024 and 2025, including a Canadian result of about C$2,125 and a Cape Ann Auction result of about USD 14,600, fall below the 2015 Rockport price.

There is no catalogue raisonne, and no single gallery or estate holds exclusive representation. His secondary market is instead handled by a number of American-art dealers, including Vose Galleries, Questroyal Fine Art, Bedford Fine Art Gallery, and Madron Gallery, alongside regional auction houses such as Rafael Osona Auctions and various New England sale rooms.

Thieme's market rewards patience with documentation rather than speed. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and dealer expertise carry more weight than they would for an artist with a settled scholarly record. Auction data is patchy and heavily weighted toward regional New England and Massachusetts sales, and reported "record" prices vary widely by database because most track only their own limited transaction history rather than the full market; the best-documented figure available is USD 21,850 for Quarry in Rockport in 2015. His museum presence, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and LACMA, is the strongest evidence of durable art-historical standing, while the absence of a single estate gallery means buyers should expect to work with more than one specialist dealer to build a full picture of a given work's history.