News-Antique.com - Dec 02,2009 - Sotheby’s auction of American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture on 3 December 2009 will offer collectors a rich array of works by American artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. The auction includes a number of major paintings and
sculptures almost entirely unknown to the market, many of which have been in private collections for the last several decades. Works from the sale will be exhibited at Sotheby’s New York galleries beginning 28 November.
Featured on the cover of the sale catalogue is Childe Hassam’s 1895 painting, The White Dory, Gloucester from the collection of Winthrop L. and Margaret Carter of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (est. $2.5/3.5 million). In 1895, Hassam was at the height of his powers as an Impressionist. Hassam likely started The White Dory during his 1894 visit to Gloucester, and completed it in his studio during the winter months of 1895, finally exhibiting it at the National Academy of Design the following spring. Critics responded with enthusiasm; The New York Times declared at the time, “Agreeable in composition, charmingly drawn and painted, Mr. Hassam has invested this canvas with a brilliancy and
realism of sunlight.” The canvas features a central figure, most likely the artist’s wife Maud, as the focal point of the composition and showcases Hassam’s impressionist staccato brushwork, which suggests the effects of the shimmering
sun on both the water and the folds of the figures dress. Hassam would continue to paint Gloucester throughout the rest of his life, bringing the vibrancy and clarity of his Impressionist vision to this quintessentially American setting.
Sotheby’s will also offer six works from the Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers, noted collectors and arts benefactors from Akron, Ohio, including Marsden Hartley’s Mountain #22 and Milton Avery’s Mountain Landscape.
After returning from an extended sojourn in Europe and unable to face either his critics in New York or bitter memories from his childhood in Maine, Marsden Hartley spent the summer of 1930 in the mountains of New Hampshire. While there, he painted a series of works, including Mountain No. 22 (est. $800,000/1.2 million), that depicted views of the American wilderness reminiscent of Cezanne’s views of the French countryside. Mountain No. 22 creates a bold visual effect in which the viewer’s focus is drawn to the imposing mountain and is considered one of the artist’s best works from this series.
Milton Avery’s 1947 Mountain Landscape (est. $500/700,000), also from the Myers Collection, is one of seven works by the artist offered this season. In the summer of 1947 Avery and his family escaped the heat of New York City and travelled to Northwest Canada, where he filled his sketchbooks daily with views of the countryside. Avery pushed his landscapes to the farthest limits of pure abstraction using simplified shapes and flat planes of color. He never abandoned the traditional convention of working from nature, always including some small detail to keep his pictures from becoming pure color-fields. In Mountain Landscape, Avery depicts the rolling green hills and distant
