"Hope", Original Mixed Media on Canvas Painting by Sandra Ferguson

Anthony Claps (1894 – 1964) was born in Buffalo, New York. He studied at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, and the Albright Art School. He was a painter, and a craftsman, working in the field of leather tooling and design at the Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York. After his service in the U.S. Marine Corps, he moved to Chicago in the 1920s and became a Midwest landscape and portrait painter. In the 1930s, he attended the Minneapolis School of Art, and was employed as a leather craftsman at Brown & Bigelow in Minneapolis. From the 1920s through the early 1960s, he produced hundreds of paintings and won numerous awards for his work. Chicago exhibit venues include the Oak Park Arms Hotel, Monte’s Restaurant, Riccardo's Restaurant Gallery, and the All-Illinois Society of Fine Arts at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. He continued his studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and the Austin, Oak Park, River Forest Art League, now known as the Oak Park Art League (OPAL), where he was an artist member, a teacher, and a board member for many years. In 1959, he studied with Hans Hofmann in New York. He returned to his studio, and explored more abstract shapes and colors, as can be seen in this beautiful painting.

Mother and Son is a large, striking, mid-century portrait, with intriguing looks on both Mother and Son’s faces. Is the son saying, "Why do I have to be here?" This painting fills a wall beautifully, and has lived with a Claps family member north of Chicago since its creation in 1959. The successful "Anthony Claps Retrospective" at the Oak Park Art League in 2006 brought in people from all over the country to see 54 beautiful Claps pieces displayed together in a show curated by OPAL's then Board Chair, the late Keith Taylor, and Claps granddaughter Susan Yackley. A Catalog Raisonne’ of Claps work has been completed by grandson Jim Rasfeld which contains information, and photos of over 225 paintings and samples of his leatherwork. Tony and his wife, Edith, raised five children and lived in Chicago, Illinois