Charles Sheeler

flush-mounted, 1918-19; accompanied by a backboard fragment, with annotation 'by Charles Sheeler property of Dorothy Miller' in pencil and with a typed MoMA exhibition label, stamped 'Dorothy C. Miller / 12 East 8 Street / New York, N. Y. 10003'

Collection of Dorothy Miller, New York

Doris Bry, New York, 1992

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Charles Sheeler, October - November 1939, cat. no. 116

The Elite and the Popular Appeal of Charles Sheeler (New York: James Maroney, 1986), pp. 54-55 (a print now in the collection of The J. Paul Getty Museum)

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and Norman Keyes, Jr., Charles Sheeler: The Photographs (Boston, 1987), pl. 8 (Lane Collection print)

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Gilles Mora, and Karen E. Haas, The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist (Boston, 2002), p. 47 (Lane Collection print)

William A. Ewing, Flora Photographica: Masterpieces of Flower Photography (London, 1991), pl. 72 (Amon Carter Museum print)

This astonishing early print exemplifies Sheeler's deft handling of light, both during the camera exposure and in the darkroom. Sheeler was able to capture in crystalline detail not only the bright sunlight as it fell upon the waxy unfurled leaves, but also the subtle, abstract reflection of the singular white water lily. This luminous early print is in excellent condition. It is on double-weight paper with a smooth, very faintly glossy surface. Upon close examination, a few small deposits of the photographer's original retouching are visible overall. The thin, cream-colored margins are bumped at the corners. This print is flush-mounted to a sheet of undeveloped photographic paper, and a small area of slight puckering is visible in the lower right quadrant. The second sheet of photographic paper is slightly larger than the print, and a thin excess of paper and dry-mounting tissue are visible along the upper edge. The reverse of the photographic paper mount is glossy and speckled, and there are linen tape hinge remnants across its upper edge.
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Taken on commission for arts patron and personal friend Agnes Meyer, this lily image was included in an album of 29 photographs that documented the architecture, interiors, and gardens of Seven Springs Farm, Meyer’s Westchester county estate.  In 1915, Meyer had been instrumental in founding New York’s short-lived Modern Gallery, later renamed the De Zayas Gallery, where Sheeler both worked and exhibited.  A print of The Lily – Mt. Kisco was among a handful of photographs included in February 1920 in Sheeler’s early one-man show with De Zayas.  

The present print was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in 1939 in Sheeler’s first major museum retrospective of paintings, watercolors, prints, and photographs.  ‘The photographs,’ New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote, ‘are simply magnificent.  I do not think I have ever seen finer ones from any hand.  In them, too, we discern the architectonic and abstract fundament upon which Sheeler bases all that he does’ (The New York Times, 8 October 1939).

This photograph comes originally from the collection of Dorothy Miller, one of the first curators at The Museum of Modern Art, who organized Sheeler’s 1939 retrospective.  It is accompanied by a backboard fragment stamped with Miller’s 12 East 8^th Street address, her home with husband and fellow curator Holger Cahill, which served for decades as an incubator for Manhattan’s modern artists.

As with most of Sheeler’s photographs, extant prints of the present image are scarce.  Three prints have been located in institutional collections: in the Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the great repository of Sheeler’s work; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.  Only one other print of this image is believed to have been offered at auction, sold in these rooms in November 1981 from the collection of the photographer’s widow.