CHARLES DEMUTH | A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS (NO. 1)

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).