American Art
American Art
Lot Closed
September 30, 06:20 PM GMT
Estimate
15,000 - 25,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
CHARLES DEMUTH
1883 - 1935
A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS (NO. 1)
signed C. Demuth, dated - 1918 - (lower left) and inscribed he was always/a seeker after/something in the/world that is there/in no satisfying/measure, or not/at all (lower right)
watercolor and pencil on paper
10 ⅞ by 8 inches
(27.6 by 20.32 cm)
The artist
Daniel Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Samuel A. Lewisohn, New York, 1927 (acquired from the above)
By descent to the present owner
Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits, London, 1919, n.p., illustrated
Emily Edna Farnham, Charles Demuth: His Life, Psychology and Works, Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1959, vol. II, no. 335, p. 495
Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde, New Haven, Connecticut, 1995, pp. 86-87, illustrated
According to Barbara Haskell, "The most clearly self-referential of all Demuth's literary illustrations is the one he executed for Pater's "A Prince of Court Painters," the portrait of Antoine Watteau in his Imaginary Portraits in 1887. Pater's Watteau was a mirror image of Demuth. The pictorial styles of both artists share delicacy, nuance, and a facile, refined technique. Psychologically, their works evoked the fleeting nature of happiness and the intertwined character of theater and real life" (Charles Demuth, New York, 1987, p. 110).