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

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Art; Coral Gables, Florida, University of Miami; Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery; Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College; Newark, Delaware, University of Delaware; Oberlin, Ohio, Oberlin College, Charles Demuth Retrospective Exhibition, March 1950 - June 1951

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Charles Demuth, October 1987 - October 1988, pp. 97, 110, 117, pl. 45, 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).