American Art 1850-1950

AMERICAN ART

AMERICAN ART

G E R A L D P E T E R S G A L L E R Y, N E W Y O R K

© 2014 GERALD PETERS GALLERY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING OR INFORMATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.

AMERICAN ART

G E R A L D P E T E R S G A L L E R Y, N E W Y O R K 2 4 E A ST 7 8 T H ST R E E T, N E W YO R K , N E W YO R K 10 0 7 5 W W W. G P G A L L E R Y. C O M

A C K N OW L E D G E M E N T

This catalogue represents my new association with Gerald Peters – and parallels the pride and appreciation that this relationship embodies.

Since joining Jerry and the New York Gallery this spring, there has been a frenzied flurry of activity and changes - in location, working relationships and new material. My constant continues to be the beautiful works of traditional American art that I have always lived and worked with – works that will always be my restorative resource.

With this catalogue, I am hoping to share with you the same pleasure and inspiration that I experience from such a group of paintings and sculpture. Certain works have the ability to transport one to other times and almost mythic places of great beauty. These works regardless of their authorship all share a depth of quality and richness that convey the exceptional tapestry that makes up American art from 1860-1960.

It is equally important to present works by painters and sculptors one is well acquainted with, but also to introduce new or lesser known artists. Artists such as John Costigan, Lockwood de Forest, and F. Luis Mora, may not have attained the same attention and fame as their contemporaries or whose reputations have diminished in the past century – but the quality of the work merits one’s attention and appreciation in the same vein as those of the masters we have also included.

No catalogue would be complete without thanking the people who are part of the Gerald Peters Gallery who made this project possible: Lena Banyan, whose exceptional organization and compilation of material and support with the day to day running of the gallery; Alice Levi Duncan and Alexandra Polemis Vigil for their efforts contributing to the research, writing and editing, and to our extraordinary art handler Erik Babcock. Last, but far from least, thanks to Shane Mieske for her creative and thoughtful design of this beautiful catalog. A further thanks is due to those art historians who have worked on specific entries and contributed so much to the research and writing: Valerie Ann Leeds, Lisa N. Peters, Melissa Webster Speidel, Virginia Budny, David Cateforis, and the late Ronald G. Pisano.

A debt of gratitude is also due to Phil Lajoie and Marianne Litty, and the great staff of Pure Imaging and Antiques & Fine Arts Magazine.

As a dealer from a long tradition in the American art world, it is my privilege to work with these beautiful objects. For this I wish to thank those of you who allowed our gallery to include these works in this catalogue.

AMERICAN ART

THOMAS ANSC HUTZ (American, 1851-1912) Near Cape May, 1894 watercolor on paper 10 x 14 3/8 inches Provenance: Private Collection, to the present

A talented portrait painter and an influential teacher, Thomas Anschutz dedicated his career to the realist tradition in American art. Born in Kentucky, Anshutz spent his early childhood on his family’s farm before moving to Wheeling, Virginia, where his father’s family had originated. He moved to Brooklyn in 1871 to pursue art, enrolling in classes at the National Academy two years later and exhibiting works at the Brooklyn Art Club, where he had become a member. In 1875 Anschutz moved to Philadelphia to attend classes at the Philadelphia Sketch Club held by Thomas Eakins and, the following year, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Eakins and Christian Schussele. In Philadelphia, he thoroughly immersed himself in the American realist tradition as practiced by his teacher, Eakins, and promoted

by Eadweard Muybridge, whom Anschutz assisted at the University of Pennsylvania in his photographic motion studies. Quickly proving his merit as a teacher and as an artist, by 1881 Anschutz had been promoted to the faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy, inheriting Eakins’s life classes in 1886 and his role as mentor to the next generation of realist painters, including Robert Henri and John Sloan. Anschutz’s talent, influence, and significance as an instructor would eventually elevate him to the directorship of that institution.

In 1892, desirous of furthering his own art education in order to become a better teacher, Anschutz and his wife, Effie Shriver Russell, left for Europe. Anschutz spent several months attending classes at the Académie Julian, where he studied with Henri-Lucien Doucet and Adolphe-William Bouguereau. Anschutz’s exposure to the French Impressionists while in

Europe led him to begin experimenting with plein-air drawing as a way of exploring the mutable effects of light and color on his surroundings. Between 1894 and his death in 1911, Anschutz would create a series of small works, many completed in watercolor, a medium which encouraged the quick and immediate translation of a subject to paper, through which he experimented with the artistic and aesthetic potential of plein-air painting.

The present watercolor, Near Cape May, is an example of one of Anschutz’s plein-air studies.

Drawn in 1894, it would have been completed in one sitting on a beach near his summer home on the New Jersey shore the year after he returned from France. That year Anschutz and his wife purchased a home in Holly Beach, New Jersey. Using his new summer retreat as home base, Anschutz made the shoreline of New Jersey the focus of his plein-air studies and this group of works is now often referred to as the Holly Beach series.

In Near Cape May, a work representative of the Holly Beach series, Anschutz has adeptly captured the shimmering atmospheric qualities of a hot summer day at the beach. Here horizontal bands of sand and sky reflect the intense summer light, casting the sailboat and red boathouse in sharp relief. As is typical of the artist’s Holly Beach watercolors, there is no action or narrative represented. Anschutz instead allows the viewer to fill the scene with his or her own associations.

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MY RON G. BARLOW (American, 1873-1937)

Seated Woman in Cloak, ca. 1910 oil on canvas 33 x 33 inches signed lower left: Barlow Provenance: Private Collection, New York

Myron G. Barlow was born in Ionia, Michigan, but grew up in Detroit. He worked as an illustrator for a local newspaper, supporting himself in that field while beginning his formal art education at the Detroit Museum of Art School with Joseph Giles. Barlow moved to Chicago to continue his training at the Art Institute, likely studying under John H. Vanderpoel. By 1894, however, Barlow had decided to travel to France where he would ultimately spend the majority of his life and career. In Paris he studied briefly at the Académie Colarossi where he received his first award for his efforts that year. After passing the challenging entrance exams, Barlow entered the École des Beaux-Arts where he took classes with Jean-Léon Gérôme. Through the 1890s he received further instruction from Adolphe-William Bouguereau, who had taught Giles, Barlow’s first Detroit teacher, and who became a mentor for the young artist. During this time, Barlow made several trips to Holland to study and copy Old Master paintings at the Rijksmuseum. There he encountered first-hand the works of Jan Vermeer, which would remain a significant influence in Barlow’s aesthetic development. The critical praise he received during his student years culminated in 1897 when he received a gold medal at the Paris Salon.

At the turn of the century, Barlow left Paris to settle in the village of Trépied on the coast of Pas-de-Calais near Étaples, which had become a popular artist colony frequented by American artists including E. Irving Couse, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Max Bohm. There Barlow converted an old farmhouse into his home and studio, using it and its garden behind as the setting for many of his paintings. Barlow began exhibiting his works widely in France and in the United States. His oils were regularly included in the annuals at the Paris Salon and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He received a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and again in 1915 at the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.

Barlow had been elected an associate member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1907 and a full member in 1912. He was an active member of both the American Art Association of Paris and the Paris Society of American Painters. Throughout, he preserved his connection to his home city, maintaining a studio at the Fine Arts Building in Detroit and his membership to the Scarab Club. During his lifetime, his paintings were collected by public institutions, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Douai, France. Several years before his death, Barlow became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest award conferred by the French government.

Barlow likely completed the present painting in his home in Trépied around 1910. The subject, a solitary female figure isolated in an interior, represents a compositional type that became characteristic of Barlow’s oeuvre. It reveals the lasting influence that Vermeer’s compositions had on Barlow and became a platform on which he experimented with color, light, and form. Depicted wrapped in a blue and pink cloak, the figure stares absently at the table before her, which is draped similarly in a patterned cloth of soft blues and pinks. The color scheme is picked up again in the bundle that rests in the wicker basket at the figure’s feet. The blue pitcher and pink cup that rest on the table complete the scene, connected to the overall composition as much by their color as by their physical presence on the tabletop.

Paintings such as Seated Woman in Cloak, which shows no action and lacks any narrative, become more about the quality of the colorism and the emotions that the color scheme elicit from the viewer than about the figure who is represented.

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ALBE RT BI ERSTADT (American, b. Germany, 1830-1902) Sunrise on the Platte, ca. 1862 oil on canvas 15 1/8 x 31 1/2 inches signed lower left: A Bierstadt Provenance: [Post Road Antiques, Larchmont, New York, acquired at auction, 1975]; Private Collection; [Joseph Szymanski, Beverly Hills Wilshire Hotel, California, 1991]; Private Collection, Los Angeles, 1991; [Heisler Fine Arts, San Mateo, California, 2008]; Private Collection

Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, near Dusseldorf. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was two years old. Little is known about his childhood or how he turned toward a career in art, but by 1850 the young artist was offering instruction in monochromatic painting. The following year he began exhibiting his own work locally in New Bedford, as well as further afield in Boston. Realizing his need for formal training, in 1853 Bierstadt returned to Germany with the intention of enrolling at the Dusseldorf Academy to study with his mother’s cousin, painter Johann Peter Hasenclever. Arriving in Dusseldorf to find that Hasenclever had died, Bierstadt decided to remain anyway. He spent the next four years studying art and traveling extensively through Europe with his American contemporaries, including Emanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, Sanford Gifford, and William Stanley Haseltine, before returning to the United States in 1857.

In 1859, shortly after returning home, Bierstadt embarked on his first trip west. He was chosen to be a civilian artist on Frederick Lander’s government expedition which set out to improve the wagon roads of the South Pass from Fort Kearny to the eastern border of California. By the middle of the year, Bierstadt was following the Oregon Trail, meeting and sketching thousands of gold seekers and immigrants along the way. In late summer he returned east, moving to New York and establishing his studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building. Bierstadt immediately began turning his sketches into finished canvases, which he exhibited annually at the National Academy.

Bierstadt returned west again in 1863, traveling for several months with his friend Fitz Ludlow, whose wife, Rosalie, later became Bierstadt’s wife. They spent several weeks in Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, before traveling north into Oregon. The sketches made on this second trip provided Bierstadt with material that would sustain his career. By 1864,

scarcely five years after painting his first Rocky Mountain picture and having just returned east from his second journey to the frontier, Bierstadt had become the preeminent recorder of the American West.

Bierstadt likely completed Sunrise on the Platte around 1862, shortly before embarking on his second western sojourn. The Platte River meanders across 1,000 miles of Nebraska’s Great Plains, from its origin at the confluence of the North and South Platte Rivers in the west of the state to its terminus just south of Omaha, where it drains into the Missouri River at the Iowa border. The present painting likely depicts a location along one of the Platte’s tributaries, the North Platte River, near the Wyoming border. The triangular rock formation depicted along the central horizon line of Sunrise on the Platte suggests Scotts Bluff, an outcropping that rises 800 feet above the surrounding grasslands and which was an important landmark to emigrants along the Oregon and Mormon Trails.

Bierstadt completed at least two other views of this national monument: Sunset on the Prairie (Sunset Near Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska) and Sunset with Deer, both dated 1861. In each of these three depictions, Bierstadt eschews his typical subject matter of dramatically lit mountain vistas by minimizing Scotts Bluff, which is relegated to the distant background here, as in his other two views of the landmark, to a distant break in the horizon. Bierstadt chose instead to favor the quiet and atmospheric qualities of the scene, offering a beautiful and sweeping view of the plains of the central United States.

This painting will be included Melissa Webster Speidel’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné. We are grateful to Speidel for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

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ALBE RT BLOC H (American, 1882-1961)

Clowns 1 (Clownbild I), 1911 oil on canvas 19 13/16 x 28 inches signed and dated lower right: AB 1911 inscribed on verso: Februar 1911 Provenance: Estate of Albert Bloch, Lawrence, Kansas; Mrs. Anna Bloch, Lawrence, Kansas; Michael Lowe, Cincinnati, Ohio; Cincinnati Art Galleries, Cincinnati, Ohio, by 1989; R.H. Love Galleries, Chicago, by 1994; Private Collection, Illinois

Clowns I is an important early painting by Albert Bloch, one of the most significant American participants in the modernist art movement in Europe during the 1910s. Born and raised in Saint Louis, Bloch resided in Munich from 1909 to 1919. In 1911 he met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who invited him to show in the two landmark exhibitions of der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), staged in 1911 and 1912; Bloch was the only American included, which led him to be recognized as “The American Blue Rider.” He went on to exhibit in other major avant-garde shows such as the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne and the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First Autumn Salon) in Berlin, working in a style influenced by cubism and Kandinsky’s colorful abstract expressionism. From 1912 to 1917 Bloch’s work was displayed regularly at Herwarth Walden’s famous Berlin gallery Der Sturm (The Storm), the premier showcase for modernism in Germany (Bloch showed Clowns I there in 1913). During the 1910s he also had solo exhibitions in Munich, Frankfurt, Jena, Chicago, and Saint Louis, and in 1921, following his return to the United States, a large retrospective exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in New York. Afterwards, however, Bloch, having developed a strong aversion to the commercialization of art, decided to withdraw from the marketplace and to exhibit only by invitation, while supporting himself as head of the art department at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he taught from 1923 to 1947. He continued to live in Lawrence until his death.

Bloch depicted circus clowns and commedia dell’arte figures, such as Harlequin and Pierrot, frequently and repeatedly throughout his long career, as did such contemporaries as Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Walt Kuhn. The art historian Lloyd Goodrich, wrote that the circus “supplies the color and glitter that are lacking in our standardized modern civilization of ready-made clothes, drab uniforms, solemn functions and deplorable lack of public pomp and display. Against all these humorless and anti-artistic tendencies, the circus clown, with his insanely painted face and his grotesque costume stands as a living denial of the commonplace values of everyday life.”

Clowns I was the first of four documented pictures of circus clowns that Bloch painted between 1911 and 1914 while in Europe. [Clowns II, formerly in the collection of Arthur Jerome Eddy, was known

in the 1990s to be in an American private collection. Clowns III and Clowns IV are believed to have been destroyed by the artist. A watercolor, Zum Klownbild IV (For Clown-Picture IV) (1914) is in the collection of the Paul Klee-Stiftung, Bern.]

Bloch’s attraction to the clown subject can first be traced to his early career, when, after dropping out of high school and briefly studying at the Saint Louis School of Fine Arts, he worked during the first decade of the twentieth century as a freelance illustrator, cartoonist, and caricaturist for a number of American periodicals, most notably the Mirror, a political and literary weekly published in Saint Louis.

Bloch drew several clowns and other circus subjects for the Mirror, including a cover image for the August 6, 1908, issue whose composition forecasts that of Clowns I. The 1911 painting in turn presages one of the most striking compositions of Bloch’s later career, March of the Clowns (1941, Collection of the Jewish Museum, New York), in which a parade of clowns, observed by a host of characters from American comic strips such as Popeye, Krazy Kat, and Moon Mullins, prematurely celebrates the defeat of Adolf Hitler, portrayed as a bewildered doll hoisted on a pole by a strutting clown, and dangling from a swastika surmounted by the Jewish Star of David.

While considerably more elaborate in its style and iconography than Clowns I, March of the Clowns shares with its predecessor a quality that Bloch himself described in a letter of 1914 as fundamental to all of his clown paintings – a “note of . . . unbridled extravagance and folly.” This note is found in Clowns I, perhaps its most fresh and unvarnished expression within Bloch’s body of work.

We are grateful to David Cateforis, Professor of Art History, The University of Kansas, for his research and text.

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OSC AR BLUEMNER (American, b. Germany, 1867-1938) Cohasset charcoal on paper 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches signed lower right with artist’s monogram: OFB inscribed lower left: Cohasset S4 – 20 Provenance: Private Collection, New York

Oscar Bluemner was born in Prenziau, Germany, in 1867, where he trained as an architect before immigrating to the United States in 1892. By 1900 he had settled in New York where his interest in Modernism soon led him to Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. There he saw works by American artists, including Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, and John Marin. In response to these artists, over the next few years Bluemner discarded the dark and tonalist palette that he had developed in Germany in favor of intense colors and simplified forms. In 1912, Bluemner visited Germany where he saw the Sonderbund exhibition, an aspiring survey of European modernism, which was the precursor of the 1913 Armory Show. Already convinced of the transcendental and emotive power of color, Bluemner became profoundly impressed by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. He also identified with the spiritual aspects of German Expressionism and, in particular, the elegant styles of Kandinsky and Klee.

Returning to New York later that year, Bluemner further simplified his style into a series of regulated shapes, uniting his dual interests in architecture and color to form a unified whole. He exhibited five pictures in the 1913 Armory Show, all landscapes that included trees and architectural elements rendered as flattened and simplified forms in high-toned, prismatic colors. The confluence of German and American modernist traditions at the heart of Bluemner’s style impressed Stieglitz, who mounted a solo exhibition of his work in late 1915 and secured his participation in the Anderson Gallery’s Forum Exhibition of American Painters in 1916.

Moving to New Jersey in 1916, Bluemner continued to exhibit in Manhattan with a series of shows at the Bourgeois Galleries held between 1917 and 1923 and at J. P. Neumann’s New Art Circle between 1924 and 1926. That year, Bluemner moved to South Braintree, Massachusetts, where he would remain for the rest of his life, although he maintained his artistic link to New York City with shows in 1928 at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery and at the Whitney Studio Gallery the following year.

In the 1930s, Bluemner began to evolve his aesthetics to an ever more modernist interpretation of the world around him. While he painted and exhibited works documenting similar subjects to his earlier period, he did so with increased spatial ambiguity and structural abstraction.

While his finished paintings revolved around his reverence for color, Bluemner produced hundreds of charcoal drawings throughout his career that served as the bases for his completed works. As in the present composition, which shows the coastline along Cohasset, Massachusetts, near the artist’s home in South Braintree, Bluemner made use of the minimalism of black charcoal on cream paper to work out the angularity of forms, depth of vision, spatial properties, and the color values and tones of the particular scene. He described such drawings in his notebooks as “constructive form sketches.” Bluemner would enlarge his constructive sketches, in tandem with his “tone sketches,” into completed oil or watercolor paintings, using the detailed notes about color, date, and time of day, which he often wrote on the verso of these sketches, as a guide to his finished compositions.

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ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER (American, 1837-1908)

Along the Coast of Maine, ca. 1880 oil on canvas 15 x 33 inches signed lower left: AT Bricher Provenance: By descent in a private collection, Michigan, until 1970, and Virginia, 1970 to 2006; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2007

A successful artist in his own lifetime, Alfred Thompson Bricher devoted much of his long career to creating landscape and marine paintings in the tradition of the Hudson River School. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bricher was raised primarily in Newburyport, Massachusetts, not far from Boston. He moved to that city in 1851 and began taking art classes at the Lowell Institute, which he paid for by working as a clerk at a mercantile company. Seven years later Bricher had returned to Newburyport, now a professional artist. He established a studio there and began making sketching excursions during the summer months with fellow landscape artists William Stanley Haseltine and Charles Dix. Feeling the limitations of a small town, Bricher moved his studio to Boston in 1860, having already opened a satellite studio there the previous year. He began exhibiting his works at the annual exhibitions of the Boston Athenaeum and producing landscape works for chromolithographic reproduction by Louis Prang & Company. Raising his ambitions even more, Bricher finally moved to New York in 1868, establishing his studio at the YMCA building and continuing his practice of summer sketching trips throughout the northeast.

By the 1870s, Bricher had become an acclaimed artist. Touted in 1875 by The Art Journal as a leader of the second generation of American landscape painters, Bricher continued to produce precisely executed studio paintings based on his detailed plein-air sketches. He exhibited his completed works widely in Boston, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. He remained an active member of national art associations, including the Artists’ Fund Society, The Brooklyn Art Association, and the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, and

in 1879 he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design. In 1890, he built a home for his family in New Dorp, Staten Island. From that retreat he continued to sketch and paint in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine, until his death in 1908.

Bricher completed Along the Coast of Maine in the 1880s. During the previous decade, he had defined his artistic preference for coastal scenes, sketching each year in locations that ranged geographically from New York’s Long Island north to Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick. The resulting paintings record the eastern seaboard in Bricher’s detailed, precise, and realistic style that pays homage to his Hudson River School forbearers, including Fitz Henry Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, who had turned their brushes to similar subject matter a generation before. By the 1880s, when he completed the present canvas, Bricher had become, along with his contemporaries William Trost Richards and Francis Augustus Silva, one of the preeminent marine painters in the United States.

The present canvas is representative of Bricher’s mature style in its strongly horizontal format and its crisply rendered details. In the 1880s Bricher increasingly reduced the narrative features of his works to the bare minimum. In Along the Coast of Maine there are few narrative elements left, limited to the lighthouse in the distance (likely Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, which Bricher visited frequently), and the cresting waves, breaking and receding in green sea foam, which serve to invoke the poetic symbolism of the calm after the storm.

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THE ODORE E ARL BUTLE R (American, 1861-1936)

Sweet Peas, Butler’s Garden, Giverny, ca. 1920 oil on canvas 32 x 32 inches signed lower right: T Butler Provenance: By descent through the artist’s family; Private Collection, Paris, France, 1953

Impressionist painter and protégé of Claude Monet, Theodore Butler was one of the few American expatriate painters to become a permanent resident of the art colony at Giverny.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1861, Butler studied with William Merritt Chase and Thomas Wilmer Dewing at the Art Students League. During his student years in New York he formed a close alliance with the burgeoning group of American Impressionist painters including Theodore Robinson, Julian Alden Weir, and Philip Leslie Hale, with whom Butler traveled to Paris in 1886. In France, Butler continued his art education, enrolling in classes at the Académie Julian and at the Académie Colarossi. He further studied privately with CarolusDuran, the famed teacher of John Singer Sargent and the mentor of another of Butler’s NewYork professors, James Carroll Beckwith. Butler began exhibiting works at the Paris salon soon after his arrival, receiving an honorable mention in 1888. That summer, in the company of Theodore Robinson, Butler visited Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, for the first time.

Butler found inspiration in Monet’s artistic philosophy. He soon incorporated the aesthetic principles and artistic technique of the elder Frenchman into his own production. Using the vivid palette and broken brushstrokes of the former to develop his own mature style, Butler simplified form and flattened dimensionality, arriving at a personal style that emphasized color and contour. Having allied himself aesthetically with Monet, Butler soon formed a personal association with the artist as well, marrying his stepdaughter, Suzanne Hoschedé in 1892. After Suzanne passed away seven years later, Butler married her sister, Marthe, who had become a devoted friend to the artist and a surrogate mother to his children.

Now settled in Giverny and developing the Impressionist style that would define his career, Butler began to gain exposure through exhibitions, both at home and abroad. He showed

paintings at Barc de Boutteville Gallery in 1894 and was given a one-man exhibition at the Vollard Gallery in 1897. He consistently sent works home to the United States to be included at the annuals at the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Butler exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, where the Fauves gained notoriety; at the Sociêté des Artistes Indépendants; and in 1913 he contributed two works to the Armory Show in New York. Although Butler moved to New York with his family for the duration of World War I, he maintained his ties to France, serving as vice president of the Society of Independent Artists and sending works to that group’s exhibitions throughout the war. He returned to Giverny in 1921 where he remained for the duration of his life and career, a true expatriate artist and an influential Impressionist painter.

The present composition, completed in the early 1920s, is a characteristic example of Butler’s mature Impressionist style. The high-keyed palette, dominated by bright shades of green, reveals the lasting influence that Monet had on the artist’s oeuvre. However, the flattening of form exhibited here is distinctive of Butler’s personal style. The flowering sweet pea vines that dominate the foreground meld seamlessly into the grass and the tree line behind, challenging the viewer’s eye to discern shape and form within this abstracted view of the artist’s cherished garden.

Sweet Peas, Butler’s Garden, Giverny will be included in Patrick Bertrand’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné.

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PETER C ALE DON C AME RON (British/American, 1852-1934)

Creek in Marsh, Absecon Island, 1894 watercolor and gouache on paper 16 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches signed, dated, and titled lower right: NJ USA/ABSECON ISLAND./CREEK IN MARSH/PCameron/1894 Provenance: Private Collection, Connecticut

Peter Caledon Cameron painted this scene along New Jersey’s Absecon Island in 1894. This realistically rendered and topographically specific watercolor is representative of Cameron’s work in its use of saturated color, crisp brushwork, and almost photographic realism to precisely document the visible characteristics of the scene at hand. Creek in Marsh, Absecon Island, bears the type of descriptive title that Cameron often inscribed on his works. He detailed the location depicted, the date, and often the time of year or the meteorological conditions under which he completed a particular composition. Such cataloguing supports Cameron’s apparent interest in documenting truthfully, and almost scientifically, the locations that captured his artistic interest.

At present, little is known about Cameron’s life and career. He was born in England where he worked as a portrait and landscape painter, completing bucolic scenes of the British countryside into the 1880s. According to an inscription on the verso of one such watercolor, he was apparently a member of the Manchester Limners Club and Academy. In 1883, he became certified as a British government art master at South Kensington’s National Art Training School (now the Royal College of Art), a credential he sometimes included in inscriptions on his paintings. By 1884 he had arrived in the United States on the first of many such trips, completing a winter scene of Niagara Falls that year. According to the dates and locations inscribed on his paintings, Cameron appears to have traveled between the eastern United States and the United Kingdom throughout the 1880s and 1890s. By 1902 his was registered as a resident of Philadelphia and submitted an exhibition piece to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts that year. During his years in the United States, he painted most frequently along the coast of New Jersey, exhibiting a preference for coastal scenes, such as the present watercolor.

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W ILLIAM MERRIT T C HASE (American, 1849-1916)

Shinnecock Landscape, ca. 1895 oil on panel 10 1/4 x 16 inches signed lower left: WM Chase Provenance: Private Collection, New York; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2007

One of the foremost portrait painters of the Gilded Age and at the vanguard of the Impressionist movement in the United States, William Merritt Chase remains one of the more influential players in the late-nineteenth century American art world. Born in Williamsburg, Indiana, Chase moved with his family to Indianapolis in 1861 where he received his first artistic training from a local portrait painter. In 1869, Chase moved to New York to advance his art education. He enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design and received private training from Joseph Oriel Eaton. After only one year of study, Chase was obliged to return west for financial reasons. He settled in Saint Louis, where his family had moved, and set up a studio with fellow artist James W. Pattison. The following year he exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy.

Intent on furthering his academic art background and with the financial support of his Saint Louis patron W.R. Hodges, Chase enrolled at the Munich Royal Academy in 1872. There he studied under Alexander von Wagner and, later, took master classes with portrait painter Karl von Piloty. Chase further allied himself with a group of young American painters working under the academician Wilhelm Leibl. This group, which included Frank Duveneck, Joseph Frank Currier, and later John Henry Twachtman, would remain important artistic allies for the remainder of Chase’s life and career.

Chase returned to New York in 1878 where he established himself in the Tenth Street Studio Building. That year he began teaching at the Art Students League and quickly reintroduced himself to the New-York art world by exhibiting four works at the inaugural exhibition of the Society of American Artists. By the 1880s Chase had become one of the most prominent

figures on the New York art scene. He had become both a talented and influential painter, whose work was consistently included in major exhibitions nationally and internationally, and a significant teacher who helped guide the next generation of artists to maturity.

Chase completed Shinnecock Landscape around 1895, five years after first visiting the picturesque location on Long Island’s South Fork. In 1891, at the urging of one of his patrons and local Shinnecock resident, Chase established the Shinnecock Summer School of Art. The following year his summer home, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, was completed and the Shinnecock hills became his summer stomping grounds for the next decade. The paintings Chase completed during these summers, including the present oil sketch, are considered his “quintessential evocation of American Impressionism.”

Believing that a “successful picture ought to look as if it has been blown on the canvas in one puff,” Chase adopted the practice of plein air painting. Taking his paint box and canvases or boards with him, he walked the Shinnecock hills setting up his easel when he encountered a scene, or stretch of land, or a particular quality of light that struck his eye. The resulting works, such as the present Shinnecock Landscape, which depicts the hillside of a neighboring farm, capture the spontaneity of the moment, a characteristic of his artwork that Chase considered his primary concern.

The present work is included in volume three of by Ronald G. Pisano’s catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

23

W ILLIAM MERRIT T C HASE (American, 1849-1916)

Miss J. (Content Aline Johnson), ca. 1900 oil on canvas 64 1/8 x 40 3/8 inches signed upper right: Wm. M. Chase Provenance: William Merritt Chase, 1902; Mrs. Johnson (presumably Augusta Adelaide Johnson, the sitter’s mother), 1903; Miss Content Aline Johnson; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, bequest of Content Aline Johnson, in memory of her mother Mrs. Johnson, 1949; (Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico)

Miss J. (Content Aline Johnson) is a classic example of William Merritt Chase’s formal portraiture done in the manner of the great seventeenth and eighteenth century English portraitists, Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough. Here, Chase presents a tour de force of artistic skill and dexterity. Chase has cropped the figure of Miss J. at three-quarter length to create a dramatic and direct composition. He presents his subject with her left hand, and the flower it holds, resting on a table covered with a delicate oriental fabric. The fabric, the wisp of the white plume in Miss J.’s hair, and the brilliant diamond and emerald pins on her dress are conscious and convincing demonstrations of Chase’s ability to render a variety of textural qualities. Such skill is evident moreover in his remarkable treatment of the various fabrics of the sitter’s dress, coat, and the table covering. In the background Chase provides a veritable still life, a subject for which he was most celebrated at the time. The still life objects – a black teapot, a red lacquered box, and a porcelain figurine, all of which allude to oriental culture – lend an artistic touch to what is already an impressive display of wealth and social stature. Furthermore, Chase presents his sitter as a dignified and self-assured individual, one of sensibility as well as sensitivity.

Content Aline Johnson was one of Chase’s students, studying under him at the New York School of Art and at the Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Eastern Long Island. Although there are no enrollment records of the New York School of Art or Chase’s summer school, Johnson’s presence at Shinnecock is documented by a letter she and other Chase students wrote to him on September 20, 1901, at the close of the school’s season. Chase’s portrait of her was probably done between this date and the time it was first exhibited in February of 1903 when Chase began featuring it in important portrait shows in an attempt to attract other society portrait commissions. Given the elaborate nature of this work, its grand scale and lavish treatment, as well as the fact it was lent to shows by the sitter’s mother, it is apparent that it was a commissioned portrait.

Little is known about Johnson’s personal and professional life. Dictionaries of American artists reveal that she was born in Bloomington, Ilinois, but no date is given. Aside from studying with Chase in New York and Shinnecock Hills, she received instruction form Kenyon Cox, Frank Vincent DuMond, and J. Alden Weir, probably at the Art Students League of New York. She also attended the Cooper Union Art School in New York, and the Académie Julian in Paris. Johnson began exhibiting her own work, mainly portraits and figure studies, at the National Academy of Design in 1907 and participated in other major annual exhibitions such as those held at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There is also evidence of a close personal association with Chase, and his family. According to Chase’s early biographer, Katherine Metcalf Roof, he named his youngest daughter Mary Content Chase (born February 2, 1904) after Johnson. She also participated in an exhibition of former students of Chase’s at Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art held at Memorial Hall, Southampton, in 1922, and the following year she contributed to a fund to have a bronze bust of Chase made from New York University’s Hall of Fame. Johnson also owned at least three other paintings by Chase which she lent at various times to exhibitions, Nude and Still Life with Fruit were lent to the Exhibition of Works by William Merritt Chase, which was held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters (April 26-July 15, 1928), and Morning, Shinnecock lent to Virtuosity of Paintings held at the Century Association (January 12-27, 1935). Johnson continued to exhibit her own work at professional exhibitions. In 1932, when she last participated in the National Academy of Design’s annual show, her address was listed as New York City. Later she moved to Beverly Hills, California, and exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. She also had solo shows at the Fisher Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club. She died in Beverly Hills, November, 1949.

We are grateful to Ronald G. Pisano for his research and text.

25

C OLI N C AMPBE LL C OOPE R (American, 1856-1937)

Gate of the Maharaja’s Palace, Jaipur, 1914 oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 32 1/8 inches signed lower left: Colin Campbell Cooper 1914 Provenance: Private Collection, New York ; By descent to the present owner

Best known today for his Impressionist views of America’s growing cities, Colin Campbell Cooper developed a fascination with architecture that influenced his artistic production throughout his career. Born in Philadelphia, Cooper studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. He established a studio in Philadelphia in the early 1880s and began exhibiting works at the Academy’s annuals, a practice he would continue almost yearly through the 1920s.

In 1886 Cooper went abroad. While he had traveled with his family as a child, his 1886 sojourn to Europe was his first as a working artist. He visited Holland and spent time at Laren, a Dutch artist colony where he met his future wife, artist Emma Lampert. In 1889 Cooper moved to Paris to complete his art studies at the Académie Julian, the Académie Delacluse, and the Académie Viti. In Paris, Cooper experienced first-hand the work of the French Impressionist painters and soon adapted the bright palette and open brushwork of his European contemporaries to his personal style. During his years in Europe, Cooper became enamored with the monumental medieval architecture he found throughout the continent.

Through the 1890s he developed his artistic reputation around his impressionistically rendered architectural scenes that were based on his experiences abroad.

After returning to Philadelphia, Cooper accepted a teaching position at Drexel University in 1895. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, he and his wife had decided to move, leaving Philadelphia in favor of New York where Cooper refocused his artistic efforts

on capturing the bustling urban center. During his years in Manhattan, Cooper continued to travel extensively. He and his wife visited locations across the United States, including New Mexico and California. They returned to Europe and ventured further afield to India, painting constantly at each location they visited. Cooper’s 1915 visit to California for the Pan-Pacific Exposition, where he exhibited several works, made a lasting impression. In 1921, following the death of his wife, Cooper relocated permanently to Santa Barbara, where he became an active member of that city’s artistic community, painting extensively through the end of his life.

Cooper painted the present view of the entrance to the Chandra Mahal palace in Jaipur, now the capital of Rajasthan, following his 1913 to 1914 trip to India. Gate of the Maharaja’s Palace was included the following year in his 1915 exhibition of paintings “made in India” held at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York. Referred to as the “Pink City,” the buildings that comprise Jaipur’s historic city center, laid out in a linear grid, were painted a uniform pink, which by the turn of the twentieth century had become a trademark characteristic of the city. Here, Cooper has focused his palette on the city’s distinctive color, casting a rosy haze across the palace wall and mimicking the color in the turf of the plaza below. The gate, wall, and plaza radiate in contrast to the vivid blue with which Cooper represented to summer sky above. Utilizing the bright, sun-struck palette adopted from the Impressionists, Cooper captures the brilliance of Jaipur.

27

JOHN E DWARD C OSTI GAN (American, 1888-1972)

Autumn Woodland, 1950 oil on canvas 16 1/2 x 17 inches signed lower left: J.E.Costigan Provenance: Private Collection, Kentucky

With a career that spanned three quarters of the twentieth century and that witnessed the evolution of American art from Impressionism through Abstract Expressionism, John Edward Costigan remained a recognized and decorated artist through the end of his life. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1888, Costigan was orphaned in childhood and was raised by his aunt and uncle. In 1903 he moved to New York City with the assistance of his relatives, who had secured a position for him in the pressroom of H.C. Miner Lithography, where he ultimately worked his way up from press assistant to staff artist.

In 1906, Costigan received his only formal art training. He enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League, studying for several weeks with William Merritt Chase and George Bridgeman. He supplemented this brief schooling by attending evening sketching groups at the Kit Kat Club, where he honed his skills in life drawing.

By 1915, Costigan was exhibiting his works publicly. That year he participated in a group show at the MacDowell Club in New York, followed by an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1916, and an exhibition at New York’s Babcock Galleries the following year.

Although his career was on the ascent, Costigan put his artistic ambitions on hold during World War I. In early 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served with the 52nd “Pioneer” Infantry Division, which deployed that year to France. Returning to the United States in 1919, Costigan married sculptor Ida Blessin and the couple moved to a farm in Orangeburg, New York, a town on the Hudson River near the Tappen Zee. Their new home and the surrounding fields and woodlands would provide Costigan with subject matter for his paintings and prints for the remainder of his career.

In the years following his return from World War I, Costigan’s career revived. He painted prolifically and began exhibiting extensively at galleries and museums in New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, and as far west as Illinois. He participated in exhibitions at the Salmagundi Club, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum. He received recognition from critics and from his peers. He was awarded the first of almost annual prizes in 1920. He won the National Academy’s Hallgarten Prize and the Salmagundi Club’s Isidor Prize that year, followed by the Art Institute’s Purchase Prize in 1922.

Although Costigan continued to pursue outside work – he remained on the staff of H.D. Miner until its closure in 1934; he taught at the Art Students League; worked as an illustrator for MacClure’s Bluebook; and as a machinist at a defense plant during World War II – his reputation as a painter of talent continued to grow. He was made an Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1928 and, in 1968, the Smithsonian Institute affirmed his enduring relevance to the American Art world, awarding him a retrospective exhibition that circulated nationally. Costigan continued to paint and produce prints until the last years of his life. He died in Nyack, New York, in 1972.

Costigan painted the present scene in the woodlands surrounding his Orangeburg, New York, home in 1950. This autumnal scene, in its application of broad brushstrokes and focus on capturing the play of light as it filters through the trees to the forest floor, is representative of Costigan’s oeuvre. His incorporation of the figural elements that humanize the scene, seen here in the form of the cloaked figure, likely his wife whom he often used as a model in his paintings, and the three goats that forage in front of her, is likewise a characteristic element of Costigan’s paintings.

29

CHARLE S C OURTNEY C URRAN (American, 1861-1942) Bear Cliff Rocks, 1930 oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches signed lower left: CCC inscribed verso with the artist’s record no. 236-5, titled, and signed Provenance: Gift of the artist to his daughter, Emily Curran, and Chi Kai Liang; Bequest to their son, Stanley Liang; By descent to his son; The Caldwell Gallery, Manlius, New York; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2007

Charles Courtney Curran developed his reputation around genre scenes of women engaged in leisure activities, such as the present Bear Cliff Rocks. Born in Kentucky and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, Curran studied art for one year at the Cincinnati School of Design before moving to New York in 1881. There, he received private instruction from Walter Satterlee and later enrolled at the National Academy of Design in 1883, supplementing this course of study with classes at the Art Students League. Curran first presented his work publicly in 1883 at the National Academy’s annual exhibition. He was granted his first of many awards five years later, winning the National Academy’s Third Hallgarten Prize in 1888, the same year that he was elected an associate member of that institution. After marrying Grace Winthrop Wickham in 1889, Curran decided to finish his art education abroad. He and his wife moved to Paris where Curran took instruction from Benjamin Constant and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and exhibited works at the Paris Salon, receiving an honorable mention for his 1890 submission. During his years in Paris, Curran worked to refine his style, perfecting his skills in figure drawing, and polishing his technique in oil painting.

After returning to the United States, Curran’s career flourished. During the next twenty years he exhibited widely, with works represented in national exhibitions including the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. He continued his association with the National Academy of Design, becoming an Academician in 1904 and serving as secretary beginning in 1911. Curran was additionally a member of the American Watercolor Society, the Salmagundi Club, and the New York Watercolor Society. He became influential to the next generation of artists through his teaching

positions at the Pratt Institute between 1895 and 1896 and at the Art Students League between 1901 and 1904. Remaining faithful to the realist, figurative works that had established his reputation, Curran largely eschewed modernism. His patrons remained faithful as well enabling Curran to support himself as an artist to the end of his life.

Bear Cliff Rocks depicts the summit of Bear Hill above the town of Cragsmoor, an artist colony in the Shawangunk Mountains west of the Hudson River where Curran first summered in 1904. The artist and his family quickly established themselves as permanent summer residents and built a home there in 1910. In Cragsmoor Curran found limitless inspiration for his canvases in the surrounding landscape, as well as in the vibrant group of artists and friends that populated it.

The present composition is representative of Curran’s Cragsmoor paintings. Painted en plein air, the canvas suggests the brilliant setting to be found at the heights of Bear Cliff.

Curran has reduced the compositional elements to the rocky summit, on which the four figures stand, and the hot summer sky, which encompasses nearly two thirds of the canvas. The middle ground, which should comprise the “view” to which the spectator expects to direct his gaze and which presumably brought the four women to the summit, is reduced here to a narrow slip of field and hill in the lower right-hand register of the painting. Rather than documenting the inspiring view directly, Curran allows his viewers to experience it second-hand. Although excluded from the composition, it is experienced implicitly through the posture and gaze of the female hikers who stand at the summit and look in our stead to the landscape beyond.

31

LOC KWOOD DE FORE ST (1850-1932)

Maine Coast, 1915 oil on paper 14 x 12 inches signed lower left: L de F June 6/15 Provenance: Estate of the artist

Lockwood de Forest, a prominent designer and interior decorator of the aesthetic movement, was born in New York in 1850. The son of wealthy and well-connected parents, he grew up in Manhattan and at Nethermuir, his family’s estate on Long Island. He began painting as a teenager, receiving informal training during a family trip to Europe from Frederic Edwin Church, a close family friend and de Forest’s great uncle by marriage. Returning to New York in 1869, De Forest formalized his studies a few months later, taking classes with James MacDougal Hart beginning in 1870. He maintained his relationship with Church during this time, considering him his mentor, and he made frequent trips to Olana, Church’s house on the Hudson River, to sketch. In 1872, de Forest rented a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building where he encountered several other paragons of the Hudson River School, including Sanford Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, and Jervis McEntee. Traveling with these and other landscape painters to the familiar sketching grounds of the Adirondacks, Rhode Island, and Maine, de Forest soon had ample material to begin exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in 1872.

An inventive man in every aspect of his life, de Forest did not limit his creative energies to the fine arts. In 1879 he partnered with Louis Comfort Tiffany, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler to form the Associated Artists, an interior decorating business that attracted the Gilded Age elite, including Henry Havemeyer, Chester A. Arthur, and Cornelius Vanderbilt II. After marrying Meta Kemble in 1880, de Forest and his new wife traveled to India for an extended honeymoon and business trip. De Forest devoted himself to finding the best craftsmen and designers from whom to source furniture, textiles, and decorative arts for the New-York showrooms of the Associated Artists. Although his partnership with Tiffany, Colman, and Wheeler dissolved in 1883, de Forest parleyed the connections he had made in India, and the aesthetic he had so expertly developed while there, to establish his own interior decorating and architectural consulting firm that year.

He continued to design furniture and architectural spaces for clients, including Andrew Carnegie, through the turn of the twentieth century.

De Forest visited California in 1889 and became enamored of the west coast. By 1902, he and his family were spending every winter in Santa Barbara and in 1915, having sold his business to Tiffany Studios several years prior, he finally built a home there. De Forest left the east coast permanently in 1922, retiring to Santa Barbara where he devoted himself again to painting.

Even while building his professional reputation as a decorator, de Forest painted constantly throughout his life, producing hundreds of oils and exhibiting almost annually at the National Academy of Design and at the Century Association. While he created a number of large-scale studio works, his preference was for the small, intimate oil sketches, such as the present Maine Coast, that he completed in one sitting, en plein air. Such sketches, which were personal in their character and in their connection to de Forest’s life and experiences, constitute a visual journal. Early on, de Forest developed a habit of recording the date and often the location of these sketches, as if writing an entry in a diary. Of these works, de Forest stated in an 1876 letter to his friend Walter Launt Palmer that “I feel that I can give a better idea of what I see with a few strokes of my brush than volumes of manuscript could do.” De Forest used his oil sketches as a way of documenting his impressions of the sights he encountered on his frequent travels and the mood that those sights evoked within him.

Beginning in the 1870s, de Forest spent a month each summer in Maine, first visiting Frenchman’s Bay and Mt. Desert Island, and later purchasing a summer home in York Harbor near the New Hampshire border. The present scene, dated June 6, 1915, was likely completed during one of de Forest’s final visits to his York Harbor home before moving permanently to Santa Barbara. The small composition perfectly achieves de Forest’s goal of capturing the character of the vista on hand. Here, the roiling waves and rising swells, combined with the bank of gray clouds moving in from off shore, capture a feeling of excitement and nervousness through their suggestion of an impending storm.

The details of cliff, ocean, and sky are cursorily depicted. De Forest’s relies instead on color to capture the character of the location depicted and the mood elicited by the scene.

33

LOC KWOOD DE FORE ST (1850-1932)

Rocky Eastern Shore, Distant Island Maine, 1875 oil on artist’s card stock 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches initialed and dated lower left: L de F July 19/75 Provenance: Estate of the artist

Dated July 19, 1875, de Forest likely completed the present work near Mt. Desert Island during one of his summer sojourns to northern Maine. Beginning in the early 1870s, de Forest spent a portion of each summer that he was in the United States at Mt. Desert, residing there for the month of August and often accompanied there by artist friends. As was his habit, he almost daily set brush to paper, capturing the world around him.

Rocky Eastern Shore, Distant Island Maine, reflects the influence of John Ruskin, who espoused the idea of truth to nature.

Articulating this influence late in his career, de Forest wrote that “my idea of picture painting is to make everyone who looks at my pictures think of real nature, and not of me or the way the painting is done.” De Forest further articulated that “nothing can ever be a real work of art until it fulfills some useful purpose.” The purpose for him was the faithful documentation of his impressions of the world around him. Rocky Eastern Shore achieves these goals. Here, the arc of the coastline with jutting rocks interrupting the stretch of sand, the pine forests lining its perimeter, and de Forest’s careful selection of pigments with which to document each element, combine to capture the truthful character of the northern coast of Maine. The smoothness with which de Forest applied his pigments and the harmonious gradations of tone used to define the sea and sky effectively efface de Forest from the depiction and allow the viewer to impose his or her own reflections onto the scene.

35

THOMAS W I LMER DEW ING (American, 1851-1938)

Purple and Green (Woman In Front of Drapery), 1908 oil on cradled oak panel 20 x 15 3/4 inches 53 1/4 x 31 inches framed in original, Stanford White grille-type, cast frame signed lower center: TW Dewing Provenance: William Gwinn Mather, Cleveland, Ohio, acquired through Charles Platt before 1914; By bequest to his wife, Elizabeth Ring Ireland Mather, Cleveland, Ohio, 1951; Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Fund, Cleveland, Ohio, 1954

In 1906, Ohio-born industrialist William Mather commissioned his estate, Gwinn, to be built on the shores of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. Years before, in search of an architect and designer for his future home, Mather had consulted his friend and mentor Charles Lang Freer, the Detroit industrialist, who as early as 1898 had suggested Mather hire the New-York architect and landscape designer Charles A Platt. Writing to Mather, Freer stated that Mather “could do no better than to call to [his] aid my friend, Mr. Charles A. Platt…”

Mather ultimately granted Platt the commission for the design of the house and the gardens, as well as the responsibility of furnishing the estate’s interior. Platt commissioned works from other artists he knew and respected who formed part of the Cornish Colony, including Louis Saint-Gaudens, Paul Manship, John Henry Twachtman, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing.

Dewing was one of Charles Lang Freer’s favorite artists and benefited from his patronage throughout his career. It was likely Dewing who had introduced Freer to Platt at his home in Corning, New Hampshire, in the 1890s. When Platt was seeking artists for Mather’s estate, Dewing was a clear choice, as not only did his art appeal to Mather’s aesthetic, but once again he was following Freer’s advice on patronage. Mather quickly became a “sensitive and discerning buyer” of the artist’s paintings and drawings and acquired “an impressive body of [Dewing’s] works from 1910-1917” including the present painting, Purple and Green, which was displayed at Gwinn through Mather’s life.

Dewing’s artistic pedigree was impressive. Born in Boston, he studied with William Rimmer before moving to Paris to finish his training at the Academie Julien in Paris.

With his return to the United States and a move to New York in 1880, he began teaching at the Art Students League and exhibiting at the National Academy, where he won prestigious awards and was advanced as a member. Under Freer’s patronage, he went abroad in the 1890’s to meet Whistler and again to be immersed in modern French art.

However Dewing preferred his own unique style and by 1900 was back in New York with a successful (both critically and commercially) exhibition at Montross Gallery. At that point he began to work with the architect Stanford White, whose exquisite designs for frames complemented the painter’s aesthetic.

Purple and Green is from 1908, the pivotal year when he won the Carnegie Prize. The subject is the same model (unknown but identifiable by her thick brown hair, small face, aquiline nose, and thin frame) and within a similar setting as two other 1908 works: the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s painting, Necklace, and Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery’s Portrait in a Brown Dress. Purple and Green is a beautiful example of Dewing’s mature style depicting an ethereal female figure in an ambiguous setting, infused with artificial light and painted in a tonalist palette.

This work is to be included in Dr. Susan Hobbs’ forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the works of Thomas Wilmer Dewing.

37

VI RGI NIA GRANBE RY (American, 1831-1921)

Still life of Roses, ca. 1900 oil on canvas 10 x 16 inches signed lower right: V. GRANBERY. Provenance: Private Collection, New York

Virginia Granbery was a noted art teacher and a prolific painter of still life compositions.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, she moved to New York City as a child. She studied at the Cooper Institute with A. F. Bellows and later took life drawing classes at the National Academy of Design. She made her exhibition debut at the National Academy’s annual exhibition in 1859 and continued to exhibit her work prolifically through the turn of the twentieth century, submitting paintings regularly to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Art Association, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, and the Artists’ Fund Society. She was one of the few women painters to have work included in the Fine Arts installation at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and exhibited paintings the following year at the Louisville Industrial Exposition.

The 1870s was the decade of Granbery’s greatest productivity. She began her teaching career, accepting a position on the faculty of Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute. By 1872, she had been promoted as the director of the drawing department, a position she held for eleven years. Beginning in 1871, Louis Prang & Company began to reproduce Granbery’s still lifes as chromolithographs. Marketed as “dining-room pictures” to America’s growing

middle class, Granbery’s compositions were soon hanging on the walls of homes around the country. Until 1882, Prang reproduced more works by Granbery than by any other artist, giving her works a broad and national audience.

While Granbery became best known for her still lifes, she exhibited landscapes throughout her career and later in life shifted her focus to portraiture, specializing particularly in paintings of children. She continued to paint productively through the first decades of the twentieth century from her New York studio, which she shared with her sister, Henrietta Granbery (1829-1927), who was also an artist.

In an 1879 review of the National Academy’s annual exhibition, the critic for the New York Times noted that Granbery is “going to nature to learn color in its subtlest shape.” Such realism, filtered through Granbery’s keen eye for color and careful rendering of form, is equally evident in the present composition painted twenty years later around the turn of the century.

39

WALTE R GRANVILLE- SMI TH (1870-1938)

In the Surf, Southampton, 1910 oil on canvas 6 x 9 inches signed lower right: Granville-Smith / 1910 Provenance: Private Collection, Haverford, Pennsylvania; Avery Galleries, Haverford, Pennsylvania; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2006

Born in South Granville, New York, Granville-Smith moved with his family to Newark, New Jersey, at a young age. He attended the Newark Academy where he developed his interest in art as a teenager. While still in school he took drawing lessons from local artist, David McLure, and later worked as a draughtsman at a local architectural firm. Granville-Smith soon formalized his art education, moving across the Hudson River to Manhattan where he studied for five years in the studio of Walter Satterlee. He later enrolled at the Art Students League taking classes under James Carroll Beckwith and Willard Metcalf in the early 1890s. Granville-Smith supported himself during much of that decade as an illustrator, producing high-keyed, colorful drawings for Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Scribner’s, Harper’s, and Century magazines. In 1897 the young artist left for an extended tour of Europe. He traveled through Holland and Belgium before visiting France, where he discovered first-hand the work of the French Impressionist painters, particularly those of Claude Monet. Upon returning to New York, Granville-Smith decided to stop working as an illustrator and to devote himself to painting. In 1900 he exhibited the results of his labors at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition, winning the Julius Hallgarten Prize that year.

A member of the American Watercolor Society and the Salmagundi Club, Granville-Smith was an active participant in the New York art world. He exhibited extensively and received recognition for his landscapes and genre scenes throughout his career. He won the National Academy’s George Inness Gold Medal in 1908, the Andrew Carnegie Prize in 1926, and the Benjamin Altman Prize in 1929 and 1933.

Painted in 1910, In the Surf, Southampton is representative of Granville-Smith’s mature style. His soft palette, particularly his pronounced use of white throughout the composition, coupled with his vigorous and broken brushwork, speak to the influence that his contemporary Impressionist painters had on his own artistic expression. His emphasis on the four figures that dominate the composition, however, is reflective of his grounding in the realist tradition, a characteristic that he consistently maintained in his work.

The south coast of Long Island, where the present scene is set, was one of Granville-Smith’s preferred painting locations. The artist began spending his summers on Long Island in 1896, visiting Fire Island annually. He eventually purchased a summer home in Bellport, New York, and the landscape and beaches in his vicinity, as well as the beachgoers engaged in their leisurely summer activities, became the focus of many of his paintings. Here, Granville-Smith captures the familiar sight of a family playing in the waves. The calmness of the central female figure, depicted in a blue swimming dress, eases the tension created by the wave crashing above the figure of smallest child who is positioned looking away from the viewer at the end of the line of figures. The female figure’s firm grasp of the rope and her confident stance, firmly planted in the sand, reassures the viewer of the relaxed fun and excitement of swimming the in waves.

41

MARSDEN HARTLEY (American, 1877-1943)

Flowers in Vase (Wild Roses), ca. 1936-37 oil on board 27 x 14 1/4 inches signed lower right: MH Provenance: Alfredo Valente (1899-1973); Irvin Brenner Fine Paintings, Pelham Manor, New York; Private Collection, Florida; (Salander O’Reilly Gallery, New York); Gerald Peters Gallery, New York; Private Collection, Massachusetts (2000); Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

Marsden Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight years old and he was sent to live with his sister in Auburn. After joining part of his family in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1893, Hartley began taking lessons in painting from John Semon before entering the Cleveland School of Art in 1898. His talent on display, Hartley received a five-year stipend from a trustee of the school to continue his education in New York. He enrolled at the Chase School of Art for one year before transferring to the National Academy of Design, where he studied with F. Luis Mora and Frank DuMond. During his four years at the National Academy, Hartley returned to Maine each summer to sketch and paint the landscape that so inspired him. After finishing his term at the National Academy in 1909, he moved to Maine full-time although he maintained close ties to New York.

Hartley became acquainted with Alfred Steiglitz in 1909. Impressed with the young artist, Stieglitz gave Hartley his first one-man exhibition at his 291 gallery. Hartley quickly became immersed in Stieglitz’s world of modernist art and thought. He was introduced to the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, which profoundly affected his oeuvre. Hartley’s landscapes became increasingly

reductionist and emphasized the formal power of nature. Hartley further became acquainted with the work of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Between 1912 and 1913, Hartley traveled to Europe, visiting Paris, Berlin and Munich, and experiencing the work of the European modernists first-hand. He returned to Berlin in 1914 and remained there for a year before traveling back to New York in 1915. In Europe Hartley began to develop his abstract, transcendental approach to his art, working signs and symbols into his cubist-derived compositions. After returning to the United States, Hartley led a nomadic life for the remainder of his career. He traveled across America as well as Europe, developing his modernist style with each passing year. Hartley remained a major influence in the contemporary American art world until his death in 1943.

According to Gail Scott, who examined this work in person, Flowers in Vase (Wild Roses) is related to a series of floral still lifes that Hartley completed in the 1930s. These works are connected through the inclusion of the particular vase shown in the present work and through Hartley’s application of a limited palette of primary colors.

43

C HILDE HASSAM (American, 1859-1935) On The Balcony, 1888 pastel on paper laid down on canvas 29 5/8 x 17 3/4 inches signed and dated lower right center: Childe Hassam 1888 Provenance: Milch Galleries, New York; John Fox, Boston, Massachusetts; Babcock Galleries, New York, 1963; Private Collection, Portland, Oregon, 1963 to the present

The most renowned of the American Impressionist painters, Childe Hassam remained a prolific and influential artist until the final years of his production in the 1920s. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the son of a successful merchant, Hassam received his earliest artistic training as a teenager at the Mather School before apprenticing with local wood engraver George Johnson in 1877. Hassam established himself as an independent illustrator four years later. During this period, he began to work in watercolors, spending time with his paints and paper along the Massachusetts coast. He first exhibited the works that resulted from these sketching forays in 1882 with a one-man exhibition at Boston’s William and Everett Gallery. That year he began his formal art training at the Lowell Institute and a year later at the Boston Art Club.

Having already spent one summer in Europe, Hassam decided to return in 1886 to further his education. He and his new wife, Kathleen Maud Doane, left for Paris and settled there for three years. Hassam entered classes at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. He traveled and painted widely in and around Paris and began exhibiting locally at the Paris Salon; at home at the annuals of the National Academy of Design; and had works included in Paris’s Exposition Universelle in 1889, where he received a bronze medal. His painting sales were booming and upon returning to the United States later that year, Hassam decided to move to Manhattan.

In New York, Hassam soon became a member of the American Watercolor Society and the Society of American Artists. He continued to paint prolifically and exhibit extensively.

In the midst of this professional activity, Hassam met a group of young artists who were similarly inspired by the progressive styles they had encountered abroad. Finding the existing exhibition opportunities insufficient, in 1897 Hassam, along with J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman, formed the Ten American Painters, a group dedicated to championing

Impressionism in the United States. With the intellectual and professional support of such colleagues, Hassam continuously evolved his interpretation of Impressionism, experimenting with his depictions of light and color with increasingly expressive brushstrokes and an expanding palette. The results were often too experimental for his patrons; however, his progressive style helped push the United States, artists and patrons alike, toward a modern vision of American art.

Hassam likely completed the present work at Villier-le-Bel, an estate owned by Thomas Couture’s daughter, which was located ten miles northeast of Paris near the town of Ecouen.

During their three years in Paris, the Hassams spent part of each summer on this estate at the invitation of their friends, Ernest Blumenthal, a German businessman residing in Paris, and his wife, who had become Mrs. Hassam’s closest friend in France. The estate’s large formal gardens, with terraces, raised beds, and potted plants decorating the patios, balconies, and windowsills, were an inspiration to Hassam. He completed over two dozen works that focused on these verdant gardens, many of which featured his wife placidly luxuriating in her surroundings.

Hassam excluded Villier-le-Bel’s formal gardens from the composition of On the Balcony but they make up the subtext of this scene. The female figure occupying the left of the composition, who is almost certainly Hassam’s wife Maud, gazes downward from the window to an unseen world below. A potted geranium plant rests on the broad windowsill to her right. Geraniums decorated many of the terraces at the estate and these potted plants featured prominently in at least two of Hassam’s large oil paintings of the gardens completed between 1887 and 1889.

Here the plant serves as a link between the interior space from which we view the scene, and the exterior, toward which Maud gazes. It further suggests that the object of her gaze is the blossoming gardens below that provided such inspiration for the artist.

45

C HILDE HASSAM (American, 1859-1935)

The Drive Near Paris, 1901 pastel on paper 14 x 10 inches signed and dated at lower left: Childe Hassam 1901 Provenance: The Artist, until 1935; By bequest to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, 1935; [John Nicholson Gallery, New York, 1944]; Private Collection, 1944; By descent; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2007

Hassam completed the present drawing in 1901, several years after returning from his third trip to France. As is evident from Hassam’s exhibition records, even years after he returned from abroad, the urban, everyday scenes he encountered on the streets of Paris remained present in his imagination and continued to provide inspiration. Even before visiting Paris, Hassam was inclined toward such cosmopolitan subject matter. He repeatedly turned his eye to street scenes in his native Boston and the bustle of the streets that he encountered in Paris - the busy markets and broad avenues filled with cabs and crowded carriages - retained his focus on familiar subjects. This imagery continued to provide the basis for numerous paintings and drawings that focused on urban Paris, including the present The Drive Near Paris, which he completed in 1901, four years after his last trip to France.

Hassam rendered The Drive Near Paris in pastel, a medium which he favored throughout his long career. A member of the Pastel Society of New York, Hassam worked to promote the medium, serving as an advisor to museums and private collectors in the purchase of such works on paper by American artists. Pastel is soft and fluid and Hassam likely enjoyed the freedom that such a medium allowed. Smooth to apply, easy to blend, and capable of suggesting the most solid or most light of forms, pastel lent itself to Hassam’s stylistic experimentation. Here, as in On the Balcony, the staccato application of color that Hassam developed in his oil painting, is rendered in crisp lines that represent the uneven dirt road, the rumbling carriage, and the foliage behind. Such technique contrasts with the waves of smooth and blended color that make of the blue of the sky above and reveal the versatility of pastel as a medium.

47

ROBERT HE NRI (American, 1865-1929) Walk in a Park, 1902 oil on canvas 26 x 32 inches inscribed on reverse with artist’s record book number Provenance: Estate of the artist, by descent

A painter, exhibition organizer, and compelling teacher, Robert Henri is perhaps best remembered as the leader and instigator of an independent movement that resulted in the formation of The Eight American Painters. One of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American art, he was a dynamic force and inspired many artists. Though a noted portraitist, he was also an exceptional landscape painter—the genre with which he initially established his reputation. Henri approached landscape subjects as a vehicle of expression in a way not radically different from portraiture. As he stated in the 1910 article “What is Art? Answered by Henri, Art ‘Insurgent,” published on Christmas day in The Philadelphia Record: Landscape is a medium for ideas…and so the various details in a landscape painting mean nothing to us if they do not express some mood of nature as felt by the artist. It isn’t sufficient that the sky should be beautiful and that the space and arrangement of the composition be correct…The true artist, in viewing the landscape, renders it upon his canvas as a living thing.

His landscapes evolved through several distinct phases, first manifested in a series of bright, Impressionist scenes of the New Jersey coast in the early to mid-1890s. This stage was followed by an extended stay in France, during which his style changed to a dark moody palette with loose brushwork and red and white highlights. In the late 1890s while still in France, and later after he returned to the United States in 1900, his palette lightened considerably, although maintaining deep tonalities. Henri’s first major artistic success was with landscape subjects. He entered a snow scene, La Neige, in the 1899 Paris Salon.

It was subsequently purchased by the Musée Nationale de Luxembourg (now the Musée d’Orsay, Paris), an impressive achievement for a virtually hitherto unknown American artist.

Walk in a Park dates to the summer of 1902, during which Henri joined his wife and her family for an extended stay in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. This sojourn resulted in a number of bucolic landscape subjects, including Walk in a Park, which emphasize lush topography and atmosphere.

During 1902, Henri periodically painted from memory, a practice he exercised early in his career but later abandoned. His record book entries from this time note works of the Wyoming Valley and New

York painted contemporaneously with some scenes of France. The French scenes depict Normandy and were done from memory, drawn from his previous trip to Europe that ended in 1900. In these works, as in the Wyoming Valley subjects, he was exploring interesting cloud formations and atmospheric effects as well as the lush, verdant landscape that are present also in Walk in a Park. In his record book notes he did not specify the park location. The scene could be inspired by a locale in the Wyoming Valley or New York’s Central Park, or it could be a reminiscence of France.

The characteristic brushwork, one of Henri’s defining stylistic traits, with the thickly loaded brush and free handling of pigment, is evident in Walk in a Park as in other works from this period, which include Paris, Rain Clouds (La Salle University Art Museum); The Rainbow, Normandie (Detroit Institute of Arts); Picnic at Meshoppen, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1902 (Westmoreland Museum of American Art); and The Coal Breaker (Bowdoin College Museum of Art), as well as a number of New York scenes including some of Central Park.

In his record book, Henri noted that Walk in a Park exhibits a luminous sky, gray domes, and a red chalet to the right, as well as figures of a woman and child, done in red and white, in the lower center of the composition. Of the many bucolic scenes, Walk in a Park is exceptional in the stunning radiance of the sky, crystalline atmosphere, and cloud formation, as well as the picturesque European-inspired setting. The painting presages several festive park scenes including Picnic at Meshoppen, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1902, which became a popular subject with others of the Ashcan painters, most notably William Glackens.

After 1902, Henri concluded that it was necessary for him to concentrate on a single genre in order to secure his reputation, which he decided would be portraiture. He continued painting landscape subjects throughout his life and often returned to them as a creative outlet and when stimulated by new surroundings.

We are grateful to Valerie Ann Leeds, Ph.D., for her research and text.

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JOHN FRE DE RI C K KE NSET T (American, 1816-1872) Lake George, ca. 1865 oil on board 12 x 20 inches Provenance: The Henry and Sharon Martin Collection; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2007

Known for his poetic depictions of the American landscape rendered in luminous color with carefully controlled brushwork, John Frederick Kensett was an aesthetic and intellectual leader of second generation of the Hudson River School painters. Born and raised in Cheshire, Connecticut, Kensett learned the art of engraving from his father and uncle and began working in print shops in New Haven and New York in the 1830s. Between 1840 and 1847 he made a grand tour of Europe, visiting England, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland with Asher Durand, John Casilear, and Thomas Rossiter. His careful study of the works of the old masters, such as Claude Lorraine, Titian, Canaletto, and Ruisdael, provided him with a foundation for his accomplished draftsmanship and technique. Back in New York, Kensett turned his focus to American scenery, making sketching tours across the country and translating them to canvas from his studio near Washington Square. He soon found professional success and was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1848 and an Academician the following year. Kensett’s style began to evolve in the 1850s as he combined technical prowess with an interest in rendering picturesque northeast landscape and marine subjects for which he became known.

A prolific and popular artist, Kensett was actively involved in both local and national arts organizations. He was appointed to the United States Capitol Art Commission in 1859. As a trustee of the Century Association, he undertook the organization of an art exhibition to raise money for medical supplies during the Civil War. He was one of the organizers of the New York Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in 1864. He also established the Artists Fund Society

and, in 1870, was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today his work is represented in the collections of every major American museum, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the White House.

The present work depicts one of Kensett’s favorite locations. He first visited and painted Lake George in 1853 and he consistently returned to the subject until his death nineteen years later.

Lake George, painted around 1865, shows Kensett’s style in the process of evolving from the lofty, romantic landscapes inspired by the first-generation Hudson River School painters, to the spare, luminist works for which he became known late in his career.

Lake George exhibits the subdued palette and the reductive compositional qualities that characterize these later works. Here, Kensett’s paramount concern is with capturing the atmospheric qualities of the scene. To that end, he has given over two thirds of the canvas to depicting the subtle gradations of color in the sky or to illustrating their reflection in the water below. Kensett has restricted the terra firma represented in the present landscape to the central register of the canvas, eliminating all narrative aspects from the scene in favor of creating a pure landscape.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work by Dr. John P. Driscoll and Huntley Platt.

51

JOHN KOC H (American, 1909-1978) At Home, 1953 oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches signed lower right: Koch Provenance: Private Collection, New York

A member of New York society, John Koch spent his career capturing the world in which he lived. Eschewing modernist art and abstraction, Koch devoted his canvases to idyllic scenes of upper-class life rendered in a realistic manner. He said of his art “I am quite visibly a realist, occupied essentially with human beings, the environments they create, and their relationships.” Koch was born in Toledo, Ohio, but raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He received little formal training. He spent two summers at the Provincetown artists’ colony in Massachusetts, where he attended lectures by artist Charles Hawthorne. After high school he moved to Paris for five years, where he devoted himself to painting, but neither enrolled in an art academy nor worked privately with an instructor. He began exhibiting his work during his Paris years, receiving his first award for his efforts in 1929 at the Salon du Printemp.

Koch returned from Paris in the early 1930s and settled in New York, where he stayed for the duration of his life and career. He had his first solo exhibition at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in 1935, the same year that he married musician Dora Zaslavky, who would become an important subject for his paintings. He began his association with Kraushaar Gallery in 1939, where he exhibited throughout his career. He won multiple awards for his figure paintings from the National Academy of Design in 1952,

1959, 1962, and 1964. His works were included in museum exhibitions throughout his life including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. His paintings appeared on the covers of both Life and Time magazines. Koch stopped painting in 1975 after suffering a stroke but his artwork, which continued to appear in exhibitions through the end of his life, remained relevant.

Koch was a meticulous man, from the way he dressed, to his grooming, to his carefully chosen acquaintances, and, most importantly, his apartment. Together with his wife, Koch created a “private world out of the substance of the city.” Koch’s works, such as the present At Home, typify the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit.

Grady Turner writes in his essay The Interior World of John Koch that “his studies of life in the apartment are marked by grace, bonhomie and all the essential ingredients of a recipe for the good life, as improbable as it is delectable to contemplate.” The collaboration of the Kochs set the stage for a rare glimpse into what Turner described as a “European-style oasis of high culture and refinement in New York City,” which is palpably on display in the present composition.

53

GASTON L AC HAI SE (American, b. France, 1882-1935)

Equestrienne (Amazone; Woman on Horseback) [LF 22], modeled 1917, cast 1930 or 1931 polished bronze 11 x 9 x 5 inches inscribed: C. LACHAISE 1918 [sic] stamped: ROMAN BRONZE WORKS N.Y. Provenance: Weyhe Gallery (sold 1935); Private Collection, New York and Connecticut; By descent

Best known for his voluptuous renderings of female nudes inspired by his wife, Isabel Dutaud Nagle, Gaston Lachaise was one of the more influential modernist sculptors working in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. Born in Paris, Lachaise received his earliest training at the Bernard Palissy School of Applied and Industrial Art. His precocious talent soon led him to the École des Beaux-Arts where he studied sculpture. After meeting and falling in love with Nagle, an American who had moved to France to send her young son to school, Lachaise followed her back to the United States in 1906.

Settling first in Boston, where he worked as an assistant to Henry Hudson Kitson until 1912, and later in New York, where he worked in the studio of Paul Manship from 1914 until 1921, Lachaise began to establish his independent reputation as an innovative and avant-garde sculptor. He completed his first monumental piece based on Nagle’s curvaceous figure between 1912 and 1915 [Woman (Elevation)], but it was not until 1918, a year after marrying Nagle and becoming a naturalized American citizen, that Lachaise’s career began to take off. He had his first one-man exhibition that year at New York’s Bourgeois Galleries.

Soon considered by critics and audiences alike to be one of the more pioneering sculptors in the United States, Lachaise was given exhibitions at New York’s most prestigious galleries, including Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery and the Brummer Gallery. Just over a decade later in 1935, with more than three hundred sculptures completed in media ranging from bronze, to nickel, to alabaster, Lachaise was awarded a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the first such exhibition given to a living artist by that institution. Less than a year later, Lachaise’s career was cut short with his death at the age of fifty-three.

According to Virginia Budny, the authority on Lachaise and consultant to the Lachaise Foundation, Boston, the present sculpture was modeled in 1917, not 1918, as is often stated.

The statuette was evidently inspired by a delightful childhood memory of a circus performer.

The first bronze cast was made for the sculptor’s solo exhibition held at the Bourgeois Galleries in New York City in February 1918. In that show the work was named Amazone by the dealer.

Lachaise himself referred to the group as Woman on Horseback and it is now generally known as Equestrienne. In addition to the bronze exhibited in 1918, twelve casts are known to have been produced during Lachaise’s lifetime. One of these was made in 1923 and consigned to the C. W. Kraushaar Galleries in New York City; ten were cast between 1930 and 1931 for the Weyhe Gallery in New York City; and another was sold by Lachaise to a collector in 1934. At this time, only five casts are known: in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., the San Diego museum of Art, and in three private collections (including the present work). The lifetime cast formerly in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is unlocated, as are the other seven lifetime casts. Isabel Dutaud Lachaise (1872-1957), the artist’s widow, authorized a small number of posthumous casts, and an edition of three casts designated as Lachaise Foundation casts has been completed.

The present example is one of the ten lifetime casts made for the Weyhe Gallery (1930-31) and is considered by Virginia Budny to be in superb, original condition.

55

LUI GI LUC IONI

(American, b. Italy, 1900-1988) Still Life, 1948 oil on canvas 15 1/4 x 18 1/4 inches signed and dated lower right: Luigi Lucioni 1948 Provenance: Susan Tarman, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Private Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico

One of the finest American still life painters of the twentieth century, Luigi Lucioni was born in Malnate, Italy. He moved with his family to the United States in 1911 and settled in New Jersey.

Enrolling at Cooper Union at the age of sixteen, Lucioni spent the next four years studying painting. He supported himself during these years by working as a commercial engraver, an art form that he would continue to pursue for the remainder of his career. After five additional years of study at the National Academy of Design, Lucioni won a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship in 1924. He returned to his native Italy to study the Italian Primitives, whose clarity of vision and realistic renderings would have a supreme influence on his own work.

At the end of his fellowship Lucioni returned to New York where he was awarded his first one-man show at the Feragil Gallery in 1927. Sales from this exhibition were swift and critical reviews laudatory. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of the works on display, making Lucioni the youngest artist to be represented in its collection. The success of the 1927 exhibition led to many commissions for portraits and much public recognition. In 1930 he received a commission from Electra Havemeyer Webb, who invited him to her estate in Shelburne, Vermont, to paint a portrait of her daughter. In Vermont Lucioni found both the

subject matter that would occupy him for much of his career and the place he would adopt as his home, stating that in Vermont he found himself “reborn.” In 1939 he finally purchased a farmhouse in Manchester, and for the remainder of his life and career he divided his time between New York City, where he spent the winters painting and teaching at the Art Students League, and Manchester, where he retreated for the summer months, sketching prodigiously and accumulating material to bring back to his urban studio for the long winter months.

Lucioni’s paintings, whether still life, portrait, or landscape, share an uncompromising commitment to an almost photographic realism. In the present work, each element of the composition is rendered with equal care. The clarity of line shown in the quince, for example, is only equaled by the lucidity of its reflection on the table upon which it rests. Lucioni was not only a skilled draftsman, but a master colorist. His still lifes in particular are noted for their extremely subtle juxtapositions of a variety of related tones. Here, his razor-sharp outlines are softened through masterful modulations in color and tone that almost give the present work the suggestion of trompe l’oeil, so realistic is the rendering.

57

PAUL HOWARD MANSHI P (American, 1885-1966) Spring, 1949 bronze 24 x 11 x 21 inches inscribed: P. MANSHIP©1949 Provenance: Private Collection, Lanesville, Massachusetts

Paul Manship was the “court sculptor” to America for the first half of the twentieth century and was a particularly ideal image maker for New York City. His style represented a more progressive approach than that found in academic sculpture, though it was the antithesis of cubism and abstraction. His sophisticated style combined classical motifs, streamlined silhouettes, and decorative elements of Art Deco with unrivaled surface treatment. He broke with stylistic conformity and integrated every stylistic form he confronted and was championed as the definition of contemporary art with good taste in the United States and abroad. Manship’s technical dexterity, acute mastery of scale (his works range from small and intimate works to large commissions), and use of media can only be compared to the brilliance of his predecessor on the American scene, Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Like Saint-Gaudens, the young sculptor absorbed every lesson of academic instruction. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Manship entered classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1907 where he studied under Charles Grafly and William Merritt Chase. In 1908, he began working under Isidore Konti, where he developed his hallmark style: classicizing subjects depicted in streamlined rhythmic form. He completed his schooling at the American Academy in Rome, which contributed to the uniquely cool elegance of his controlled forms. The small bronze statuettes he produced during his years in Rome, from 1909 to 1912, were collected avidly and promoted commissions for larger works, such as the Indian and Pronghorn Antelope,

completed in 1914 for the garden of Herbert Pratt, and the Morgan Memorial, installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Awards, critical recognition, numerous architectural commissions, and commercial success followed and Manship’s abilities even gained French recognition. After World War I, Manship established a studio in Paris that he maintained until 1937, in which he produced many of his most famous sculptures, including Flight of Europa, Diana and Acteon, and Indian Boy and Dog. A 1929 monograph on Manship, authored by the sculpture curator at the Louvre, is a testament to his acceptance by the French academic community. The major commissions Manship did for New York are among his most well-known works and include the Rainey Memorial Gateway at the Bronx Zoo, Prometheus Fountain at Rockefeller Center, and the sundials and fountain groups for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These landmark works reflect the imagination and creativity that made this artist a unique force in American sculpture.

Manship conceived the figure of Spring in 1949 for his own garden near Gloucester, Massachusetts. The work was placed upon a terracotta fountain with a basin decorated with the signs of the Zodiac. The work garnered acclaim, though few casts of the figure were made, making the present cast rare.

59

FRANC I S LUIS MORA (American, b. Uruguay,1874-1940) Lola in the Orchard, ca. 1910 oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches Estate stamped lower right: F. Luis Mora Provenance: Private Collection, New Jersey

One of the youngest artists to be elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design and a founding member of the Kent Art Association, Francis Luis Mora was a prolific painter and illustrator and an influential art instructor. Mora was the eldest son Spanish sculptor Domingo Mora. Born in Uruguay, but raised in Barcelona, New York, New Jersey, and Boston, Mora was enveloped in the art world from birth. He first studied under his father, perfecting his draftsmanship, before attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he enrolled in 1889. There he studied under Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell, who would remain strong influences in Mora’s career.

After returning to New York in 1893, Mora finished his academic art training at the Art Students League under H. Siddons Mowbray. By this time, Mora was already working as an illustrator for several leading periodicals and he began exhibiting his work later that year. By 1900, at the age of twenty-six, Mora received his first of many major commissions to paint a mural for the public library in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Strongly influenced by the Spanish Old Masters, particularly Francisco y Goya and Diego Velásquez, whose work he eagerly sought out on his many trips to Spain, Mora developed a personal style that merged old-master colorism and alla prima technique with the Impressionism that he learned from his teachers and mentors, Benson, Tarbell and William

Merritt Chase. Although Mora focused his brush on a variety of artistic themes, he consistently returned to figure painting as his preferred subject matter and his skills with the human figure led him to become one of the more popular teachers of life drawing classes at the Chase School of Art and later at the Art Students League.

The present painting is a sketch for a monumental figural group that Mora completed at his family’s home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in the summer of 1910. Shadows on the Orchard, which pays homage to Tarbell, is a family tableau showing his wife, Sonia, her sister, Lola, and two brothers, Alfred, and Lewis, and their mother, Emma Compton, gathered around a picnic table in the dappled shade of a tree. The scene allowed Mora to experiment with plein air painting, capturing the play of light on the faces and clothing of his subjects.

Lola in the Garden focuses on the figure of his sister-in-law. Seated in a lawn chair with a cup of tea in her hand, every aspect of her figure emphasizes the outdoor setting and the play of light and shadow over her leisurely pose. Mora said of his work in progress that “the more I get into the studies in sunlight, the more I think it is my finest work. The beautiful color in the shadows is a joy for a full palette and a light heart…” The varied and bright pigments used in the present work to depict the dappled light dancing over the scene, attest to the enjoyment Mora took in creating his “American outdoor expression.”

61

L AW TON SI L AS PARKE R (American, 1868-1954) Along the River Epte oil on canvas 25 3/4 x 22 1/4 inches signed lower right: Parker Provenance: Private Collection, Arizona

An American Impressionist painter and one of the “Giverny Luminists,” Lawton Parker was part of the second generation of expatriate artists who lived and worked in Giverny. Born in Fairfield, Michigan, and raised in Kearney, Nebraska, Parker moved to Chicago in 1886 after winning a scholarship to study at the School of the Art Institute under John Vanderpoel. Two years later he traveled to France. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1889 but transferred to the Académie Julian several months later. In Paris, Parker studied under Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Robert Fleury. Under their tutelage he refined his skills in figure painting and exhibited a portrait at the 1890 Paris Salon.

Anderson, and Edmund Greacen. Dubbed the “Giverny Luminists” at a 1910 exhibition at New York’s Madison Art Gallery, these artists merged their academic training and figurebased subject-matter with the Impressionists’ palette, technique, and philosophy. Under such influence, Parker’s style evolved. His figural subjects moved from the interior setting of his studio to the out-of-doors as he explored the potential of natural light and experimented with an increasingly Impressionist technique. His Giverny pictures led to his greatest critical acclaim. He was awarded a one-man exhibition in Chicago in 1912, a gold medal at the 1913 Paris Salon, and the Benjamin Altman Price at the National Academy of Design in 1916.

During the next decade, Parker continued to pursue his own art education and began his career as an instructor. He moved almost yearly, traveling between France, New York, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Parker enrolled at the National Academy of Design in 1895. The following year he returned Paris and to the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts.

He attended James Whistler’s Académie Carmen and, in 1897, studied mural painting independently with Paul Albert Besnard. Parker began his teaching career in 1891 at the St. Louis School of Fine Art. He ran the Fine Arts department at Beloit College and served as president of Chase’s New York School of Art. He opened his own school in Montparnasse in the late 1890s and later founded the Chicago Academy of Fine Art in 1902. Throughout, Parker grew his reputation as a portrait painter of note and he began exhibiting his works in Paris and in the United States.

Parker left Giverny in 1913 and returned to the United States, spending the next decade in Chicago and New York. In 1926 he moved back to France, settling near Paris until the German occupation of World War II convinced him to return home. He moved with his family to Pasadena, California, in 1942, where he spent the remainder of his life.

In 1903, Parker visited Giverny for the first time. Enamored with the town and invigorated by its artistic culture, he decided to make it his home for the next decade. He became associated with a group of artists that included Frederick Friesieke, Richard Miller, Guy Rose, Karl

Parker likely painted the present scene along the River Epte during his years in Giverny. The subject, a young woman with parasol in hand, and the setting, a rowboat floating softly on the river against a lush and verdant bank, provided Parker with ample material to document the play of light against different surfaces. Here, Parker emphasizes the different qualities of natural light. He captured the soft, green-hued rays that filter through the trees in the foreground, dance off the shaded water, and cast a dappled pattern against the boat and the woman sitting within. The softness of the foreground contrasts with the brilliant blue of the river water behind where Parker has adeptly captured the color and quality of direct, unfiltered sunshine.

63

LI LL A C ABOT PERRY (American, 1848-1933)

Mother and Child, ca. 1912 oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches signed upper left: Lilla Cabot Perry Provenance: Estate of the Artist; Hirschl and Adler, New York, New York; Private Collection, California

A distinguished artist and an influential promoter of Impressionism in the United States, Lilla Cabot Perry remained a successful portrait and landscape painter throughout her career.

Born in Boston in 1848, Perry grew up in a privileged household and received an extensive and refined education. In 1874, she married Thomas Sargeant Perry, a literary critic and professor of English literature. It was only after several years of marriage and the birth of her three daughters that Lilla began to paint. She did not receive formal training until 1887 when she entered classes at the Cowles Art School under Dennis Miller Bunker. Prior to this, Perry had received professional critiques of her work beginning in 1884, first from portrait painter Alfred Collins, and later from Robert Vonnoh. Moving to Paris in 1887, Perry entered the Académie Colarossi, studying under Gustave Courtois and Joseph Blanc, before transferring to the Académie Julian in 1888. At the urging of her mentor, Walter Gay, Perry exhibited three paintings at the Paris Salon the following year to critical success.

In 1889, a visit to an exhibition of works by Claude Monet led Perry and her family to Giverny. They would spend nine summers at that artist’s colony between 1889 and 1909 and Monet, who became a close friend, had a significant influence on Perry’s style. During the first two summers at Giverny, Perry came to embrace the techniques, palette, and aesthetics of Impressionism. She broadened her subject matter to focus on landscape compositions as much as on the figure studies that had occupied her to this point. Returning to Boston in 1891, Perry began to promote Impressionism at home, lecturing on the style and organizing exhibitions of American Impressionists. She exhibited seven of her own paintings at the

Chicago Exposition in 1893 and participated in a group exhibition held at Boston’s St. Botolph Club in 1894.

Between 1895 and 1909 Perry and her family moved between their home in Boston; France, where they settled jointly in Paris and Giverny; and Tokyo, Japan, where Perry’s husband served as a professor of English for three years. During this time, Perry helped support her family through an increasing flow of portrait commissions. She continued to exhibit her works at home and abroad. She received her first solo exhibition at the St. Botolph Club in 1897 and was invited to participate in the 1908 Salon des Indépendants where six of her paintings received high praise from the Parisian critics.

Returning to the United States permanently in 1909, Perry began to refocus her artistic production on the interior figure studies that had occupied her during her early career.

Mother and Child, completed around 1912, is representative of the figural works that Perry completed during this period. Exhibiting tightened brushwork and more crisply rendered than her fluid Giverny landscapes, Mother and Child reflects Perry’s shift toward a more conservative expression of Impressionism. Set in an unembellished interior, rather than the out-of-doors favored by the Impressionists, Mother and Child still exhibits the brilliant light that the Impressionists sought to capture, filtered here through an unseen window to the left of the composition.

65

FREDE RI C REMINGTON (American, 1861-1909)

Getting Hunters in Horse-Show Form, 1895 oil on canvas 27 1/8 x 40 inches signed and dated lower right: Frederic Remington / Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Bros.

Provenance: Mr. George F. Harding; George F. Harding Museum, Chicago, Illinois; To private Collection, 1982; [art market]; Private Collection

The Wild West captured Frederic Remington’s imagination early in his life and became an enduring source for his art as well as for his fame as an artist. Remington grew up in Canton, New York. He attended Yale University for two years before leaving in 1880 to travel west for the first time. On this trip, Remington became captivated with the landscape and the people he encountered. A year later, he and his new wife, Eva Cantor, moved to Kansas to open a sheep and horse ranch. Financial troubles forced them to return to New York in 1885. He enrolled at the Art Students League and the following year launched his illustrating career with several western scenes published in Harper’s Weekly. His career as an illustrator immediately prospered. He eventually had illustrations published in forty-one different magazines and his name quickly became synonymous with the Wild West.

Remington’s art career prospered along with his career as an illustrator as he proved himself a master of his subject-matter in three distinct media. He produced countless easel paintings that derived from the sketches he made for publication and created many more independent compositions. In 1895, he began experimenting with sculpture. He modeled his Bronco Buster that year, which remains one of the most recognizable works in the American canon.

He ultimately created twenty-two additional bronzes of extraordinary quality and technical superiority. Remington died from appendicitis in 1909 having produced an extensive body of work and having established himself as the premier storyteller of the Old West.

While Remington is best known for his western scenes, he created many images of life on the east coast, including the present painting of an equestrian preparing for the highjump competition, which was published in Harper’s in 1895. According to Charles Belmont Davis in his March 18, 1905, Collier’s Weekly article “Remington – The Man and His Work,” the present oil painting originally included a female figure. As seen in the published illustration of this scene [catalogue raisonné number 2011a], a woman appears standing to the left of two male observers, watching the high jump in their company. Davis wrote:

If we are able to believe Remington, he once did paint an individual with a skirt.

She was part of a picture which he had been commissioned to paint of a wellknown high jumper. The scene depicted the horse flying over a high gate at an indoor meeting, and, to add verisimilitude to the scene, he painted in a girl as one of the interested audience. The gentleman who gave the commission was delighted with the photographic likeness of his horse and accepted the picture at once, but on one condition—that the lady be painted out of the picture entirely.

In an August 23, 1908, article for the New York Herald Remington’s depiction of women was mentioned again. The author wrote that Remington told him: “I don’t understand [women], and I can’t paint them...I never put but one in a picture, and they had to wash that out before they published it.” This was, of course, pure bravado as he painted over three hundred works that included women, including the present image. As such, the oil painting was likely purchased or commissioned after the publication of the drawing and the female figure removed on the request of Remington’s patron.

The horse shown here soaring over the high-jump is Ontario, owned by Samuel S. Howland who, along with his brother-in-law August Belmont II, helped to build Belmont Park.

Ontario won the high-jumping competition at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden the year that Remington completed this composition. Ontario’s fame increased when Alexander Phimister Proctor used him as a model for his 1895 sculpture American Horse. Ontario later became the model for Proctor’s horse in Augustus SaintGaudens’ Sherman Monument in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza.

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W ILLIAM TROST RIC HARDS (1833-1905)

Second Beach, Newport, Rhode Island, 1897 oil on canvas 31 3/4 x 57 3/4 inches signed lower left: Wm T Richards 97 Provenance: Gift of Dr. Gustav Langmann to his wife, Katherine Zinsser Langmann (1958-1931), New York, New York, between 1879 and 1919; By decent to their daughter, Emily Langmann Vanderwerker (1896-1988); To her daughter, Jean Vanderwerker Burgess (1923-2000); To her daughters, Linda Burgess Eikleberry and Bonnie Burgess; [James D. Julia, Inc., Sale August 22, 2002, Lot 632]; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2006

With a career that spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century and several major artistic movements, William Trost Richards reached the end of his life and career in 1905 as one of the foremost marine painters in the United States. Born in Philadelphia and raised in that city’s environs, Richards was the eldest son of Benjamin Moore Richards and Anna Trost. After his father’s death in 1847, Richards was forced to leave school and find work in Philadelphia.

By 1850, he was employed as a designer of ornamental metalwork for a Philadelphia firm that produced gas fixtures, chandeliers, and other decorative objects. Richards’s art education commenced during this period, when he began receiving informal training from landscape painter Paul Weber.

In the 1850s, the American art scene was dominated by the Hudson River School painters and it was to this group that Richards allied himself during the first decade of his career, producing landscape paintings which he began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1852. Two years later, Richards opened a studio in downtown Philadelphia with his artist friend Alexander Lawrie and the following year the two were sent to Europe, having received funding from a group of local patrons, to complete their artistic studies in Paris, Florence, and Dusseldorf. Richards returned to the United States in 1856, exhibiting the results of his European sojourn the following year at the Pennsylvania Academy’s 1857 annual.

During his year abroad, Richards was exposed to a new wave of aesthetic thinking originated by the English art critic John Ruskin, who espoused an artistic ideology of “truth to nature”

which was quickly championed by the British Pre-Raphaelite artists. Moving swiftly away from the iconographic program of the Hudson River School, Richards found inspiration in Ruskin’s thinking. By 1863 he had been elected a member of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art and through the 1860s was considered to be one of the principal American PreRaphaelites. It was during this decade that Richards defined his primary subject matter, focusing increasingly, and later almost exclusively, on marine painting.

Richards completed the present work, Second Beach, Newport, Rhode Island, late in his career.

It exhibits many of the stylistic indicators that Richards developed during his early association with the American Pre-Raphaelites. An expansive studio work, both physically and aesthetically, of the type that comprised much of his late production, Second Beach, Newport is a reverent transcription of nature observed. The entire canvas is rendered with nearly imperceptible brushstrokes. Each element, from the minimal foreground comprised of the beach in the lower right, to the receding water and breaking waves that make up the true subjects of this work, to the expansive sky above, is painted true to nature. These minutely rendered and slickly painted details achieve Richards’s goal of effacing the hand of the artist from the canvas and presenting an exact vista through which his viewers could seemingly walk onto the beach in Newport.

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JOHN SINGER SARGENT (American, b. Italy, 1856-1925) General Sir John Cowans, 1920 oil on canvas 21 1/8 x 17 1/8 inches signed upper left: John S. Sargent and dated upper right: 1920 Provenance: Estate of the Artist; [Christie’s, London, “Sargent Estate Sale,” July 4 and 27, 1925, lot 155]; Viscount Cowdray; Richard L. Thune; [Adelson Galleries]; Private Collection, Massachusetts; [Pierce Galleries, Nantucket, Massachusetts]; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2006

Born in Florence to American parents, John Singer Sargent spent his youth traveling through Europe. He received his first art instruction in Rome from Carl Welsch, a German American landscape painter. After a brief stint at Florence’s Academia delle Belle Arti, Sargent entered the École des Beaux-Arts and soon joined the studio of portraitist Emile Augustus Carolus-Duran.

Carolus-Duran emphasized painting directly from observation to establish correct tonal values and retain the most salient features of one’s subject. This direct, economical approach became the foundation of Sargent’s style.

By 1883, Sargent had established his reputation as a portrait painter of note. The uproar surrounding his Portrait of Madame X (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), however, ended the artist’s hopes in Paris. He retreated to England and established his home in London. From 1885 until his death Sargent spent the majority of his time in England and in the eastern United States where he accumulated more portrait commissions with each passing year. His 1888 show at Boston’s St. Botolph Club helped establish him as the preferred society painter of the Boston Brahmins and led to several public commissions, including the murals at the Boston Public Library in 1890.

By 1909, Sargent had painted over 500 portraits and his reputation as the outstanding painter of Gilded Age personalities and genre scenes was firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic. After the first decade of the twentieth century, Sargent largely abandoned portraiture in favor of focusing on his large-scale public commissions and on his small, intimate watercolor compositions.

In the 1910s and 1920s he designed mural schemes for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and for Harvard University’s Widener Library. He traveled extensively, sketching the people, architecture, and landscapes he encountered and, increasingly, turned to watercolors. The results were marvels of finely tuned observation, glimpses of life from the Swiss Alps to the streets and canals of Madrid and Venice.

General Sir John Cowans is an oil study for the monumental group portrait Some General Officers of the Great War that was commissioned by Sir Abe Baily, a South African financier and statesman,

to document the twenty-two general officers who had served in the British Army during World War I and who helped secure an end to the conflict. The grand painting, completed in 1922 and measuring over 200 inches long, is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The likeness of General Cowans occupies the center point of the great canvas. The present study, completed the same year Sargent received the commission, is one of the only remaining studies for the Baily commission that is not in a museum collection.

Born to a middle-class family in 1862, Cowans became one of the most respected knighted English Quartermaster-Generals to serve in the English Armed Forces. Commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1881, Cowans worked his way through the ranks in India, becoming Commander of the Presidency Brigade in Calcutta by 1908. A highly decorated officer, by 1902 Cowans had become a member of the Royal Victorian Order, elected for special services at the War Office in connection with the Coronation of His Majesty King Edward the VII. He received a Coronation Medal in 1902 and a Durbar Medal in 1903 from King Edward VII, as well as a Coronation Medal from King George V in 1910. In 1911 he received the Companion of the Order of the Bath (Civil Division), on the occasion of the Coronation of His Majesty King George V, and became Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (Military Division) in 1919. Cowans was additionally elected to the Legion of Honor, the Order of the Crown of Belgium, and the Order of the Crown of Italy. He became Grand Cordon of the Sacred Treasure of Japan and was elected to the Chines Order of Chia-Ho, Second Class, Ta shon and the Order of the Holy Redeemer of Greece, and finally received the United Stated Distinguished Service Medal. His service during the Great War prompted his men to praise him as “the one indispensable soldier” of World War I, who possessed “a fundamental and towering humanity which, like a lighthouse in the dark, attracted every eye, held every interest, and warmed and encouraged every hope.”

General Sir John Cowans is a fine expression of Sargent’s skill as a portrait painter. With the deftness of his brushstroke and the freshness of his palate, here Sargent has created a “breathing” portrait of a famous individual.

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F R A N C I S AU G U S T U S S I LVA (American, 1835-1886)

A Summer Day on the Coast, 1882 watercolor on paper 10 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches signed and dated lower left: F.A. Silva 1882 Provenance: Private Collection, Connecticut, 2006

American Luminist painter Francis Augustus Silva spent his brief career documenting the coastline up and down the eastern seaboard. Born and raised in New York City, Silva showed artistic talent at a young age. His father, a barber of French decent, apprenticed Silva to a local sign painter where the young artist received his only artistic training. By 1859, Silva had opened his own painting shop where he specialized in ornamental painting. After enlisting in the Union army during the Civil War, Silva served first as a captain in the New York militia, and later as a hospital steward after a misunderstanding with his superior officer led to his discharge from the Army. Silva returned to painting in 1867, establishing himself as a professional artist specializing almost exclusively in marine painting. He made his exhibition debut the following year, showing two beach scenes at the 1868 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. He married Margaret A. Watts that year, moving with his new family to Brooklyn and establishing a studio in Manhattan.

During the 1870s and 1880s Silva made numerous sketching trips along the Hudson River and the northeast coast, from New Jersey north to Gloucester, Massachusetts. The sketches he made during these excursions provided inspiration for the oil paintings and watercolors

he continued to exhibit each year at the National Academy, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the American Society of Painters in Watercolors, to which organization Silva had been elected a member in 1872. Silva moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1880, maintaining a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building until 1886 when his career was cut short by his death from pneumonia.

Painted in 1882, the present work is exemplary of Silva’s watercolor technique. Silva showed A Summer Day on the Coast in 1883 at the American Watercolor Society, where he had been exhibiting work annually since the 1870s. The precise composition, clearly rendered details, and richly depicted light are characteristic of Silva’s work. While he often dedicated his canvases to placid lakes and oceans and boats floating calmly in still waters, the present composition is unusual in its energy. The waves in the foreground break more vigorously at the beach than is typical of Silva’s coastal depictions. The ruins of the shipwreck that occupy the foreground appear in sharp contrast to the idle beachgoers at the middle of the composition and appear as if a warning to the ships shown in the distance.

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JOHN SLOAN (American, 1871-1951)

East at Sunset, Camino Monte Sol, 1939 tempera with oil-varnish glaze on panel 22 1/2 x 28 inches signed lower right: John Sloan ‘39 inscribed on reverse: East at Sunset Camino/ Monte Sol/ ‘39/ JS Provenance: The John Sloan Trust

John Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in 1871. Raised in Philadelphia, he left high school early in order to help support his family. By 1892, he had joined the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer as an illustrator. While working for the Inquirer, Sloan met William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Luks, with whom he enrolled in evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At the Academy he met Robert Henri, who was to become an important friend and mentor.

In 1904, this coterie of artists moved to New York, where Sloan continued to support himself through commercial illustration. In 1907, when the jury for the National Academy exhibition rejected his work, as well as that of Henri, Glackens, Shinn, Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Arthur B. Davies, and Ernest Lawson, they decided to mount their own independent exhibition, forming as a group known simply as The Eight. Their down-to-earth realism and gritty urban subject matter quickly earned them the sobriquet “the Ash Can School” and, although initially unpopular with critics, The Eight’s portrayal of working class life was a rebellion against conventional academic artwork and an attempt to seek out truly modern, American subjects.

In 1910, Sloan exhibited in the Exhibition of Independent Artists. Although the exhibition caused a critical sensation, it was shadowed by the Armory Show of 1913 in which Sloan also participated. The period immediately following the Armory Show was a time of critical development for Sloan’s painting. During this time he became increasingly aware of the social content of his work, as well as his attachment to local scenes and types.

In 1919, on the advice of Henri, Sloan began visiting Santa Fe on a regular basis. A city of fewer than 6,000 residents and a sharp counterpoint to New York, Santa Fe became a second home to

Sloan and his wife Dolly. In many ways the Southwest had a similar effect on Sloan as New York had fifteen years before. Sloan was invigorated by the fresh sights and bustling cultural activity, both of his fellow artists and the native residents. As exhibited in the present work, East at Sunset, Camino Monte Sol, which Sloan completed in 1939, the artist discovered in the southwestern landscape a vehicle through which to express the “plastic realization” of form that he had first glimpsed in 1913 in the European works exhibited at the Armory Show. Sloan explained that he liked to “paint the landscape of the Southwest because of the fine geometric formations and handsome color. Study of the desert forms, so severe and so clear in that atmosphere helped [him] to work out principles of plastic design…Because the air is so clear [one] feel[s] the reality of things in the distance.”

East at Sunset, Camino Monte Sol was inspired by the nearly twenty preceding summers that Sloan had spent in that southwestern city. Works such as the present canvas played a pivotal role in the cultural growth of the city of Santa Fe, both by promoting Southwestern art in the cultural centers of the East Coast, as well as by broadening the exhibition program at the Museum of New Mexico to include local artists.

Camino del Monte Sol, which is the center point of the present canvas, is a road on the eastern edge of Santa Fe than runs above the city center near the edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The peak that features prominently in the background of this painting is likely Atalaya Mountain, or the “Watchtower,” a 9,000 foot high mountain that overlooks the city of Santa Fe.

75

THOMAS SULLY

(American, b. England, 1783-1872) Isaiah Vansant Williamson (1803-1889), 1837 oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches signed and dated on canvas verso: TS. 1837 Provenance: [H.V. Allison Galleries]; John P. Driscoll, Portland, Maine, 1990; [Schwartz Gallery, Philadelphia]; Private Collection, Connecticut, 2006

Thomas Sully was one of America’s preeminent portrait painters. Born in Horricastle, England, in 1783, Sully immigrated with his family to Charleston, South Carolina, at the age of nine. He received his first artistic training from his brother-in-law, Jean Belzons, and his elder brother, Lawrence Sully, both of whom made their livings as painters of miniatures. After a brief stint in the studio of Gilbert Stuart in Boston in 1807, followed closely by nine months of study in London under Benjamin West, Sully established his own studio in Philadelphia in 1810. Almost immediately, he became recognized as one of the nation’s most talented portrait painters. His romantic images remained in high demand for the duration of his career and he painted some of the western world’s most celebrated personages including John Quincy Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Queen Victoria.

Although his portraits of politicians and royalty are perhaps his best known, the majority of Sully’s prolific output is made up of portraits of private citizens, including the present image of the Pennsylvania native Isaiah Vansant Williamson. Sully completed this bust-length portrait in 1837 at the height of his career, just several months before traveling to London to work on his famed full-length portrait of Queen Victoria.

Born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to a devout Quaker farming family, Isaiah Vansant Williamson (1803-1889) died at age 86 as one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest residents. Having

worked as an apprentice at the age of fifteen to the owner of the local country store, Williamson saved enough money to move to Philadelphia where he opened his own dry goods store. By 1838, Williamson had accumulated assets totaling more than $100,000. He retired from active business that year and invested his money in a variety of ventures. By the 1880s he had grown his fortune to more than $20 million. During the last decade of his life, Williamson became a devoted philanthropist, giving away more than $5 million dollars during his lifetime, almost all of which he donated anonymously. Williamson is perhaps best remembered as the founder of The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades near Media, Pennsylvania, which was established in 1888.

Williamson evidently commissioned Thomas Sully to paint this portrait of himself shortly before his retirement in 1838. As stated in Edward Biddle’s The Life and Works of Thomas Sully, the artist noted in his Account of Pictures that he had completed a bust-length portrait of “Mr. Williamson” of 73 Market Street between third and fifteenth of July, 1837, for a fee of $200. On July 17 the artist noted in his journal that he had sent the portrait to the “Gallery,” a reference the art gallery that he owned with James S. Earle.

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JOHN HE NRY T WAC HTMAN (American, 1853-1902)

Barn in Winter, Greenwich, Connecticut, ca. early 1890s oil on canvas 18 x 26 inches signed lower left: J. H. Twachtman Provenance: Private collection, Boston; [Vose Gallery, Boston, 1967]; Private collection, Minnesota, 1968; [Spanierman Gallery, New York, 1986]; Private Collection, 1990

A founding member of the Ten American Painters and one of the foremost American Impressionists of his era, John Henry Twachtman remains an influential figure in American art history. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Twachtman received his first formal art training at the McMicken School of Design (later the Art Academy of Cincinnati) where he studied under Frank Duveneck. At Duveneck’s behest, Twachtman traveled to Munich, where he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1875. He spent several years traveling, painting, and studying in Europe with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase, finally returning to the United States in 1878 after a three-year stay. That year Twachtman settled in New York where he soon became a member of the newly-formed Society of American Artists and established a studio near Washington Square. By 1883, however, Twachtman had returned to Europe, traveling this time to Paris and enrolling at the Académie Julian where he studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre.

In Paris, Twachtman formed a close alliance with a group of American painters that included Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Frank W. Benson, and Theodore Robinson. These artists were greatly influenced by the stylistic and aesthetic principles of Claude Monet and they, along with Twachtman, would soon introduce their own interpretations of Impressionism to the United States.

Twachtman returned to the United States in 1885. He became a teacher at the Art Students League in 1889 and settled that year with his family in Connecticut, where he could be close to the home of his friend J. Alden Weir and to the artist colony of Cos Cob. Twachtman purchased a farmhouse situated on seventeen acres in Greenwich. His home, the landscape that surrounded it, and the outbuildings that populated it, became Twachtman’s primary subject matter for the remainder of his life. An avant-garde artist to the end, Twachtman spent

this last decade of his life pushing his style toward an ever more modern expression of the landscape that had captivated him for the entirety of his career. The paintings that resulted, including the present canvas, represent the body of work for which he is best known and most lauded today.

Likely completed in the first half of his Greenwich period, Barn in Winter, Greenwich, Connecticut, is a prime example of Twachtman’s work from this era. It relates directly to Winter, a work now in the Phillips Collection. These paintings present two views of the hillside and barn behind Twachtman’s house that, compositionally speaking, are almost identical one to the other. The differences, however, in light and atmosphere that Twachtman so adeptly captured in each, result in two diverse paintings. Each evokes a divergent mood and speaks to Twachtman’s preoccupation with the changeable qualities, both physical and emotional, of the landscape he was depicting.

Technically speaking, Barn in Winter is comprised of arrangements of positive and negative spaces, made up of contrasting patches of empty canvas and areas of heavily applied paint.

Observed at close range, the composition is lost. However, as Marc Simpson has described, these “vaporous patches and scruffy scrubbings of color… coalesce from seemingly random pattern to atmospheric and evocative picture only with time and distance” (p. 18 in Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly, Clark Institute, 2008). Indeed, it is through such time and distance that the emotional impact and technical genius displayed in Barn in Winter should be appreciated.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of John Henry Twachtman by Ira Spanierman and Dr. Lisa N. Peters.

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JOHN HE NRY T WAC HTMAN (American, 1853-1902)

Tiger Lilies, ca. late 1890s oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches signed verso on stretcher: J.H. Twachtman Provenance: Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Stevens, Greenwich, Connecticut (acquired from the artist); Mr. and Mrs. Weld M. Stevens, Greenwich, Connecticut; Anita Stevens Henshaw; Coe Kerr Galleries, New York; To Clabir Corporation, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1987; Sold: Christie’s, New York, May 28, 1992, lot 156, illustrated; To private collection

Garden imagery was an extremely popular subject for American Impressionists, who saw it as a vehicle for exploring color, light, and movement in nature. Among these works, John Twachtman’s are distinctive. Instead of portraying sunlit flower beds from a distance, his approach was to plunge the viewer into the tangle of a garden’s blossoms, conveying the essence of his subjects through the way he painted them. Of these images, Tiger Lilies is one of his most ebullient. In it, Twachtman has depicted a view through a cluster of fiery red-orange flowers to the back of his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The painting expresses the joy Twachtman felt in perceiving the home that he loved, which he reshaped aesthetically over the course of his Greenwich years, along with the garden he created as a vehicle for his art. The wildness and freedom of the flowers, which seem to project forward from the picture plane, contrast with the solidity of the house, its walls paralleling the stable horizontal axis of the canvas. Yet, Twachtman combined the two through his unified arrangement, creating a new entity altogether. The modernity of his design is demonstrated in the way that the forms of the garden are intertwined with those of the architecture of the house and a stonewalled storage shed at the right, allowing the painting to be read in abstract terms. At the same time, through the juxtaposition of colors and shapes in the painting, and a sensitivity to their placement within the space, Twachtman conveyed the satisfaction he received in Greenwich, between the freeing experience of nature’s exuberance and the security he received from owning a home of his own, where he could seek refuge from the pressures of city life and enjoy the pleasures of spending time with his family.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work by Lisa N. Peters and Ira Spanierman.

We are grateful to Lisa N. Peters for her research and text.

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MAX W EBE R

(American, b. Russia, 1881-1961) Joel’s Cafe, ca. 1909-10 oil on canvas 28 3/8 x 23 5/8 inches signed and dated lower right: Max Weber 1911 Provenance: [Paul Rosenberg and Co., New York, before 1953]; [The Downtown Gallery, New York, by 1958]; Mr. and Mrs. Heyward Cutting, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960; Private Collection

On December 21, 1908, Max Weber, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian-born naturalized American, left Paris to return to New York where he would profoundly affect the course of American art as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, essayist, and teacher. Henri “le Douanier” Rousseau, the visionary genius of French modernism, accompanied him to the Gare St. Lazare and called out to his departing friend, “N’oubliez pas la nature, Weber.” As Rousseau advised, Weber did not forget nature, and the natural world informed his work throughout his impressive sixty-year career. Best known today for his monumental cubist and futurist images of Manhattan from the 1910s, Weber redefined traditional subjects of figures, still life, and landscape to reflect his twentieth-century sensibility and touched on virtually every phase of modernism prior to his death in 1961.

While in Paris between 1906 and 1908, Weber produced a series of scenes that focused on the characters that populated the local cafes and bars. These works were directly influenced by the paintings, posters, and drawings of artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, whose own inspiration derived from the perceived disaffection of modern urban life which often played out in such locales. After returning to New York in 1909, Weber continued to explore

such subjects, creating a series of paintings that focused on New York’s night life and the Vaudevillian performers that populated it.

Set in Joel’s Bohemian Refreshery, a twenty-four-hour restaurant located in Times Square, Joel’s Café captures the artists, writers, performers, and political activists who frequented the famed establishment. Combining the Fauvist coloration that Weber had learned from Matisse, and showing the influence of Picasso’s primitive figural compositions that Weber would soon translate into his own interpretation of Cubism, Joel’s Café is the best of his café scenes.

Completed in 1910, Joel’s Café is incorrectly dated 1911. As Percy North explains, despite the dating on the canvas, “it was exhibited during Weber’s lifetime as a work of 1910 in his retrospective at the Newark Museum in 1959,” although “a sketch for the painting included in a posthumous Weber retrospective at the Art Galleries of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1968…includes the date 1911 and an inscription of the cafe location at 41st Street and 7th Avenue.”

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MAX W EBE R

(American, b. Russia, 1881-1961) Three Women, ca. 1925 gouache on paper 5 x 4 inches signed upper right: Max Weber Provenance: [Tom Veilleux Gallery, Portland, Maine]; Private Collection, New York, 2006

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the female figure predominated in Weber’s art. The prevalence of this subject matter may have been influenced by Weber’s teaching position at the Art Students League in New York. He was hired in 1919 as the school’s first modernist faculty member to teach, primarily, a life drawing class. His faculty position allowed him direct and daily study of the human form and, as he never hired models himself, such access to models may have encouraged his primary focus on the female figure.

As is evident in Three Women, by the 1920s Weber had moved away from the cubist aesthetic that had preoccupied him during much of the preceding decade. His works of the 1920s reflect, instead, a classicizing aesthetic that emerged in the years between the World Wars. Whether full-scale canvases, or small and intimate studies, of which the present work is an example, Weber’s nudes from this era are nearly universally presented as solitary, inward-looking figures, contemplative and melancholy in their isolation. In Three Women, although the ample and sculptural figures occupy a small, confined space, none engages with the other. Their psychological seclusion is palpable as each poses with an inward gaze and eyes cast toward the outer reaches of the picture plane. The women are physically isolated as well, separated each from the other by the red barrier that bisects the picture plane.

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ANDREW W Y E TH (American, 1917-2009) River Boat, 1963 watercolor and dry brush on paper 17 x 26 inches signed lower right: Andrew Wyeth Provenance: M. Knoedler & Co, New York, New York; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman, Detroit, Michigan, 1964; [M. Knoedler & Co., New York, New York]; Collection of Ruth A. Yerion, Amagansett, New York, 1965; Byron Collection, East Hampton, New York, ca. 1985; [Sotheby’s, New York, December 2009]; Pacific Sun Trading Company, Wellesley, Massachusetts, acquired at above sale; Private Collection, Mill Valley, California

Often referred to as the “Painter of the People,” Andrew Wyeth was one of the best-known and most popular American artists of the twentieth century. Born and raised in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Wyeth was the youngest son of Newell Convers Wyeth, the noted artist and illustrator. He grew up in a household devoted to art. A frail child, Wyeth did not attend school, but rather was home-schooled by his father who taught him the elements of drawing and painting from a young age. Wyeth studied the history of art on his own, admiring most the Renaissance masters and American painters of more recent history, particularly Winslow Homer.

Wyeth quickly mastered both his subject matter and his medium. He began to turn his attention to the themes that would occupy him throughout his career: the landscape, architecture, and people who surrounded him in Chadds Ford and his family’s summer home in Cushing, Maine.

A precocious talent, Wyeth’s artistic efforts were rewarded when he was just twenty years old. In 1937 New York’s Macbeth Galleries awarded Wyeth his first one-man exhibition. The broadly rendered paintings shown at that first exhibition, and which dominated Wyeth’s production for first decade of his career, established him in the continuum of American realist painting.

In the 1940s, Wyeth’s life and career underwent significant change. A personal crisis – the tragic death of his father and young nephew, who were killed in a car accident in 1945 – led to a change in the emotional and psychological quality of Wyeth’s paintings. He considered his father’s death to be one of the more formative emotional events in his artistic career. In the years following the

accident, Wyeth began producing emotionally charged paintings with a level of symbolism not present in his earlier production. Professionally, Wyeth spent the 1940s expanding his artistic vocabulary, introducing new media and techniques into his production and evolving his style.

Under the guidance of his brother-in-law, artist Peter Hurd, Wyeth mastered tempera, which would largely replace oil painting within his oeuvre. He additionally began to experiment with dry-brush watercolor painting, which would become a favorite painting method. Wyeth began producing the highly realistic and crisply focused paintings, most often rendered in a subdued palette, which would characterize his work for the remainder of his life.

Painted in the early 1960s, when his style reached its mature expression, River Boat depicts a dock and boat maintained by Bayard Taylor, one of Wyeth’s neighbors in Chadds Ford who lived on the property adjacent to the Wyeths’ mill. The composition, rendered in a combination of wet and dry-brush watercolor, confronts the viewer with an overwhelming sense of melancholy. In another time the boat in the foreground could be a symbol of leisure and entertainment. Here, however, rendered in a subdued palette of winter browns and grays, and surrounded by bent and broken trees, the boat elicits a longing and nostalgic reaction from the viewer, who is asked to reflect, along with Wyeth, on the changeability of his surroundings.

River Boat will be included in Betsy James Wyeth’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

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W I L L I A M ZORAC H

(American, b. Lithuania, 1887-1966) Head of a Woman (Girl’s Head, Dahlov), 1922 Mexican mahogany on original base 13 7/8 x 11 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches inscribed: Zorach Provenance: Mr. and Mrs. Edward A Sand, New York, ca. 1952; (Baridoff Galleries, 2010, Portland, Maine)

Born in Lithuania, William Zorach immigrated with his family to Cleveland, Ohio. Showing artistic talent at a young age, Zorach began studying lithography at the Cleveland School of Art on the recommendation of his seventh grade teacher and was soon apprenticing at a lithography firm. In 1907, he moved to New York and enrolled at the National Academy of Design where he received several awards for his paintings and drawings. In 1910, he continued his studies in Paris at La Palette. There he was influenced by the Cubist and Fauvist movements and submitted several paintings to the Salon d’Automne. This success fueled his career at home where he was honored with his first one-man exhibition. In 1912, he married Marguerite Thompson, a fellow artist whom he had met at La Palette. They moved to New York, established a studio, and a year later, their work was accepted into the Armory Show.

Until 1922, the year he completed his last oil, Zorach continued to think of himself as a painter but had already begun to experiment with sculpting. While working on a series of wood-block prints, Zorach realized he was more interested in the wood panel than in the print and turned it into a carved relief. With no formal training as a sculptor, his first efforts were of wood and his carving tools were primitive. He found his sculptural direction by instinct, but was not unaware of what other sculptors were doing, both at home and abroad.

He allied himself with a growing number of modern sculptors who believed in the aesthetic necessity of direct carving and found deep satisfaction in the slow and patient process of freeing each image from its imprisoning block.

“The actual resistance of tough material is a wonderful guide,” Zorach said in a lecture in 1930. The sculptor “cannot make changes easily, there is no putting back tomorrow what was

cut away today. His senses are constantly alert. If something goes wrong there is the struggle to right the rhythm. And slowly the vision grows as the work progresses.” Zorach found that the material itself had a constantly modifying effect on his vision. The grain of the wood, the markings in the stone, the shape of the log or boulder all set limits and suggested possibilities.

He was sensitive to the qualities of his material and occasionally let them play a major role in determining the finished forms. In such works, the feel of the original material is preserved and often heightened by parts of the original surface left untouched and other areas roughly marked by the sculptor’s tools.

In 1923, Zorach bought a farm in Maine, where he and his family would spend their summers. He continued to sculpt and was soon recognized as one of the country’s premier artists, honored with multiple commissions and exhibitions throughout the country. Today his work can be found in such prestigious museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. According to Roberta Tarbell, author of the catalogue raisonné of Zorach’s carved sculpture: “This head was originally carved at Provincetown in 1922 and then re-worked several times thereafter. The Sands, who talked with Zorach about the head, when they purchased it directly from him, reported that the subject is Dahlov, the artist’s daughter, as a child.”

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M ARGUE RI TE THOMPSON ZORAC H (American, 1887-1968)

Blue Cinerarias, ca. 1932 oil on canvas 46 x 38 inches signed lower right: MARGUERITE ZORACH Provenance: Estate of the Artist

Marguerite Thompson Zorach was born in Santa Rosa, California, in 1887. Raised and educated in her home state, Zorach was one of the first women to matriculate at Stanford University in 1908. However, having shown a great aptitude for painting, Zorach was allowed leave Stanford to join an aunt in Paris later that year in order to pursue art. Zorach spent four years studying at La Palette, a progressive school in the Latin Quarter where she met William Zorach whom she would marry in 1912. In Paris, Zorach was immersed in the ideas espoused by the European avant garde and by artists such as Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, among others. During this time she was directly influenced by French Fauvism in particular and began to emphasize the use of color and line over formal representation in her own work. Indeed, as Valerie Ann Leeds has stated, this “keen sense of color and design,” which Zorach began to develop during her Paris years, remained one of her “particular strengths as an artist” throughout her long career. After returning to the United States in 1912, Zorach marked the beginning of her professional career as an artist by exhibiting work at the Armory Show in 1913 and, a few years later, at the prestigious Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters. Zorach continued to evolve and expand her language of modern American art unceasingly until her death in 1968.

Fiercely experimental, Zorach’s artistic style and preferred media changed over the course of her long career as she found expression through painting as well as textile work and design.

The present painting, which she completed around 1932 and submitted to the Whitney Biennial that year, includes evidence of both Zorach’s art and craft. From 1917 until the 1930s, Zorach produced mainly embroidered tapestries. These she exhibited to great critical acclaim, succeeding, as Valerie Ann Leeds has pointed out, in elevating her textile work, which was often considered craft, to the level of fine art. Her experimentations with textile design, however, extended beyond the wall hangings that she exhibited to her family’s everyday clothing. Here the seated figure, Zorach’s daughter and frequent model Dahlov, is show wearing blue patterned stockings, which are undoubtedly the work of the artist herself.

Blue Cinerarias jointly depicts the two types of subject matter that most preoccupied Zorach during much of the 1920s and 1930s: figure painting and still life. Here Dahlov, arguably the primary subject of the painting based on her central location and physical dominance of the picture plane, confronts the potted blue cineraria plant, the titular subject of the work. The matching blue of Dahlov’s sweater and socks and the brilliant blossoms of the Cineraria plant mark each in their shared importance to the canvas. They reflect Zorach’s primary interest in design and pattern and in reconciling each within the picture plane.

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AMERICAN ART

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A RT I S T INDE X

THOMAS ANSCHUTZ, Near Cape May .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 7 MYRON G. BARLOW, Seated Woman in Cloak ................................................................................................................................................................................................ page 9 ALBERT BIERSTADT, Sunrise on the Platte ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 11 ALBERT BLOCH, Clowns 1 (Clownbild I) ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 13 OSCAR BLUEMNER, Cohasset .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 15 ALFRED BRICHER, Along the Coast of Maine .................................................................................................................................................................................................. page 17 THEODORE EARL BUTLER, Sweet Peas, Butler’s Garden, Giverny ................................................................................................................................................................... page 19 PETER CALEDON CAMERON, Creek in Marsh, Absecon Island ...................................................................................................................................................................... page 21 WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, Shinnecock Landscape ........................................................................................................................................................................................ page 23 WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, Miss J. (Content Aline Johnson) ......................................................................................................................................................................... page 25 COLIN CAMPBELL COOPER, Gate of the Maharaja’s Palace, Jaipur .................................................................................................................................................................. page 27 JOHN EDWARD COSTIGAN, Autumn Woodland ............................................................................................................................................................................................ page 29 CHARLES COURTNEY CURRAN, Bear Cliff Rocks .......................................................................................................................................................................................... page 31 LOCKWOOD DE FOREST, Maine Coast .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 33 LOCKWOOD DE FOREST, Rocky Eastern Shore, Distant Island Maine ................................................................................................................................................................ page 35 THOMAS WILMER DEWING, Purple and Green (Woman In Front of Drapery) .............................................................................................................................................. page 37 VIRGINIA GRANBERY, Still life of Roses ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 39 WALTER GRANVILLE-SMITH, In the Surf, Southampton ................................................................................................................................................................................. page 41 MARSDEN HARTLEY, Flowers in Vase (Wild Roses) .......................................................................................................................................................................................... page 43 CHILDE HASSAM, On The Balcony .................................................................................................................................................................................................................. page 45 CHILDE HASSAM, The Drive Near Paris ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 47 ROBERT HENRI, Walk in a Park ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ page 49

JOHN FREDERICK KENSETT, Lake George ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 51 JOHN KOCH, At Home ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 53 GASTON LACHAISE, Equestrienne (Amazone; Woman on Horseback) [LF 22] ................................................................................................................................................. page 55 LUIGI LUCIONI, Still Life ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 57 PAUL HOWARD MANSHIP, Spring .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 59 FRANCIS LUIS MORA, Lola in the Orchard ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 61 LAWTON SILAS PARKER, Along the River Epte ................................................................................................................................................................................................. page 63 LILLA CABOT PERRY, Mother and Child ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 65 FREDERIC REMINGTON, Getting Hunters in Horse-Show Form ..................................................................................................................................................................... page 67 WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS, Second Beach, Newport, Rhode Island .............................................................................................................................................................. page 69 JOHN SINGER SARGENT, General Sir John Cowans .......................................................................................................................................................................................... page 71 FRANCIS A. SILVA, A Summer Day on the Coast ................................................................................................................................................................................................ page 73 JOHN SLOAN, East at Sunset, Camino Monte Sol ............................................................................................................................................................................................... page 75 THOMAS SULLY, Isaiah Vansant Williamson ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 77 JOHN HENRY TWACHTMAN, Barn in Winter, Greenwich, Connecticut .......................................................................................................................................................... page 79 JOHN HENRY TWACHTMAN, Tiger Lilies ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 81 MAX WEBER, Joel’s Cafe ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... page 83 MAX WEBER, Three Women ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ page 85 ANDREW WYETH, River Boat ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ page 87 WILLIAM ZORACH, Head of a Woman (Girl’s Head, Dahlov) ............................................................................................................................................................................ page 89 MARGUERITE THOMPSON ZORACH, Blue Cinerarias .................................................................................................................................................................................... page 91

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