# Selden Connor Gile artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/selden-connor-gile/
Profile generated: 2026-05-23T14:35:00.000Z
Quality: high confidence, strong sources

## Artist identity

- Birth date: 1877-03-20
- Nationality: American
- Movements: Society of Six, California Plein-Air Painting, Bay Area Figurative Expressionism (precursor influence)
- Common media: oil on canvas

## About Selden Connor Gile

Selden Connor Gile (1877–1947) was an American painter active in Northern California from the early 1910s through the mid-1930s. He is best known as the founder and central figure of the Society of Six, a group of Bay Area artists whose vibrant plein-air landscapes and bold use of color distinguished them from the more tonalist tendencies of earlier California painting. Gile and the Society of Six drew inspiration from modernist ideas filtering westward, particularly from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Their chromatic intensity is regarded as a precursor to the Bay Area figurative expressionist movement that emerged in the following decades. Gile’s work is recorded in the Getty Union List of Artist Names, the Library of Congress name authority file, and the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD).

## Common works and media

Gile’s surviving works are primarily oil paintings on canvas or board depicting Northern California landscapes, coastal scenes, and rural views. He worked in a plein-air tradition with a distinctive chromatic richness that set his compositions apart from tonalist predecessors. Collectors may encounter landscape paintings in a range of sizes, from small pochade studies to larger exhibition-scale canvases. Works on paper are less commonly documented but may exist in private and institutional collections.

## Market and appraisal context

Selden Connor Gile’s paintings appear periodically at American art and California-painting auctions. The most commonly offered works are plein-air landscapes of Northern California executed in oil, typically characterized by expressive brushwork and saturated color. Value is influenced by provenance, condition, subject matter, and the strength of attribution. Works with documented Society of Six exhibition history or Bay Area gallery provenance tend to attract stronger collector interest. Because no comprehensive catalogue raisonné was identified in available public sources, careful authentication review is recommended before purchase or appraisal.

## Appraisily data basis

Appraisily artist pages combine identity research from museum, library authority, and scholarly sources with publicly available auction records, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lot information when those records are available. For Selden Connor Gile, this page draws on data from the Getty ULAN, VIAF, the Library of Congress, the RKD, Wikidata, and Wikipedia, supplemented by Appraisily’s internal auction-lot database of 286 recorded entries.

## Sources

- RKD: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/207424
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500064731
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/35822227/
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15430670
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selden_Connor_Gile
- Library of Congress: https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83024273