Jenness Cortez

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With the upcoming end to horse racing season in Saratoga, as proud upstate New Yorkers we have decided to share a few of the paintings in our inventory that are important to the racing culture.

Jenness Cortez (1944- ) is an upstate artist whose paintings depicting the athleticism of Saratoga's racing horses had made her a famous name in Realist art.

Cortez was born in 1944 in Frankfurt, Indiana. She began her art studies when she was 16, under the guidance of noted Dutch painter Antonius Raemakers. She attended the Art Students League of New York after graduating from the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, IN.

Following her formal education, Cortez moved to Albany, New York to work as a commercial and editorial illustrator for the biweekly community newspaper "The Washington Park Spirit." In 1974 Cortez was commissioned to create original paintings of endangered species in the Adirondack Mountains by the New York State Museum. Her paintings from that year are still apart of the Museum's permanent collection.
Cortez has been commissioned to create commemorative etchings of thoroughbred racing's Horse of the Year every year since 1981. This prints we have in our inventory are original works from Cortez spanning from the years 1983-1993.

Cortez's style is described as realist work that has been filtered through "the minds's eye."

Throughout the 1980s and her work in Saratoga, Cortez's fame gained momentum as she was commissioned on more commercial and gallery projects, which solidified her career as a prominent New York capital region artist.
In the mid 1990s, Cortez moved her interest to encompass landscapes and cityscapes, and more recently, still life.

Cortez is currently working on new projects from her studio in Averill Park, NY where her pieces are featured in she and her husband's gallery.

Own these original vintage estate-found prints from Jenness Cortez's Saratoga days: shop here. 

Vintage 1951 Amelia Opdyke Jones "Subway Sun" Ad Posters

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This is one of the more fun and interesting vintage finds we have seen recently: a set of four New York City subway ads printed in 1951. 

The set of 21" x 11" posters take the form of a newspaper header titled "The Subway Sun." Cartoonist Amelia Opdyke Jones (who always signed her work "Oppy") created these types of ads for the New York City Transit Authority in the 1940s and 1950s to promote good behavior and etiquette among subway users.
The New York Transit Authority originally hired Oppy to create cartoons to warm subway riders to the fare increase in the 1940s, however she Subway Sun ads were also eventually used to advertise technological improvements on the subway ("100 Years of Transit Progress"), as well as to encourage citizens to utilize the subway's services ("New York is Greatest - Go Subway").

Perhaps most famously in her Subway Sun ads, Oppy called out some of the more crass behaviors some NYC subway riders were becoming more infamous for in a funny-but-too-true style. In our set particularly, there is a poster with an illustration of a man falling down the stairs to the subway interest with the caption "You can get down quicker!" while a concerned woman descending the stairs in a less deranged manner looks on. To prevent confusion, warnings to "watch your step" and "take your time" decorate the poster's top corners. Oppy also illustrated ads addressing other undesirable subway behavior, such as riders putting their feet on seats, littering, and smoking.

The Monopoly-esque characters in the ads are largely recognizable as Oppy's work, and some have speculated that the women in the ads are often modeled after the artist herself. Many of the original Subway Sun ads are on display in the New York Transit Museum, but our small inventory is available for collectors or just lovers of vintage signage. Each individual poster is signed "Oppy" and marked for the New York Transit Authority.