Holle Fine Art Gallery

Holle Fine Art is at 608 Duval, and its calling card is Tom Everhart. Everhart met Charles Schulz in 1980, learned Schulz's line directly from him, and in 1991 became the only fine artist legally authorized to make original work using Peanuts subject matter, an arrangement that holds for the rest of his life. He is Yale-trained, with postgraduate study in Paris, and his paintings have shown at the Louvre and at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. What he does with Snoopy on a large canvas is not what you are expecting from a comic strip, and it is worth walking in just to see it.

The gallery also carries Steve Barton, who works in hand-painted lucite, giving the paintings a depth you cannot photograph, and it deals in original paintings, sculpture, limited editions and collectible fine art more broadly. The emphasis runs toward named, collected artists rather than island scenes, so this is a different stop from most of what is on Duval.

The practical detail that matters is the hours. Holle is open 10:00am to 10:00pm, every day. Nearly every gallery in Key West is dark by six, so along with one or two others on this stretch, this is somewhere you can look at serious work after dinner rather than carving an afternoon out of your trip to do it.

Holle is a two-gallery operation, with its other location in Hawaii, inside the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort & Spa in Kāʻanapali. That is why the roster leans national and why the inventory is not the usual Keys material. If you collect, it is worth asking what has come in recently, because stock at a two-gallery operation moves between coasts.