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Contact: Princess Street Gallery
242/ 333-2788
chascarey@harbourislandgallery.com
harbourislandgallery.com

Art show to give advance look at works by Stephen Scott Young

(Harbour Island, Bahamas: October 23, 2002)One of the most important art shows ever hosted in the Bahamas will give an advance view to works by renowned American artist Stephen Scott Young. The show of preliminary studies and watercolors is being hosted by the Princess Street Gallery of Harbour Island, Bahamas, during November. An artist's reception will be held at the gallery on the evening of November 30.

Young is recognized as one of the great American watercolorists working today. His paintings are represented in major American museum collections and are sought after by important collectors worldwide. In 1995, he became the youngest artist ever to be included in Christie's sale of important American paintings. At that sale, The Tournament, a large watercolor that depicts a group of Bahamian children shooting marbles, sold for $79,500. Since then his paintings have routinely graced the walls of Christie's and Sotheby's, hanging alongside masterworks by his idols - American realists of the 19th century Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper.

He is the most recent in a long line of America's great painters who, beginning in the mid-19th century, came to the Bahamas to paint. Initially, it was the warm climate and the Bahamas' burgeoning reputation as a tourist destination that attracted the likes of Albert Bierstadt and Winslow Homer. Here they found an antidote to the harsh New England winters.

Once settled, however, they became inspired by the tropical subject matter - the intense light, the transparent turquoise sea and the handsome native people. While in the Bahamas, both artists went on to produce some of their most critically acclaimed work, the best of which is now showcased in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Other artists soon followed, including Maurice Prendergast, Julian Alden Weir and Harry Hoffman.

Young first came to Harbour Island in 1987 and was immediately captivated by the island and its people. He began to paint the locals, especially the children, and has never looked back. During the intervening years, he has often returned, and the impressive body of work that he has produced about Harbour Island forms the cornerstone upon which his reputation as one of America's great watercolorists rests.

For Young, it is a way to give something back to an island from which he has received so much. For the Princess Street Gallery, which itself was recently featured in Coastal Living Magazine, owner Charles Carey says the show is "an immense honor."

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