Marsden Hartley

Shell

Auction Closed

May 19, 03:38 PM GMT

Estimate

300,000 - 500,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property of The Newark Museum of Art, Sold to Support Museum Collections

Marsden Hartley

1877 - 1943

Shell

signed MARSDEN HARTLEY and dated 1929 (on the reverse)

oil on board

15 ¼ by 18 ½ inches

(38.7 by 47 cm)

This work is included in The Marsden Hartley Legacy Project: Complete Paintings and Works on Paper, Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine, Gail R. Scott, Project Director and Lead Scholar.

The artist
An American Place, New York, 1929
Miss Cora Louise Hartshorn, 1930 (acquired from the above)
Bequest to the present owner from the above, 1958

(probably) New York, An American Place, Marsden Hartley, New Paintings/Landscapes-New Hampshire/Still-Lifes-Paris & Aix-en-Provence, December 1930-January 1931
Southampton, New York, Parrish Art Museum, An American Place, May-July 1981, no. 19, n.p., illustrated

We are grateful to Gail R. Scott for preparing the following essay: Shell is one of twelve still life paintings of conch, bullmouth, and other tropical shells that Hartley painted over the winter of 1928-28 when he was living in Paris. He decorated his Paris apartment with these tropical shells in a place of honor on the mantel piece. Coming off of nearly a year of doing very little painting, the shells became "stable models to get my almost paralyzed hand & eye back into health"—as he told his friend Rebecca Strand in a January 6, 1919 letter. The shells float in front of soft, amorphous backgrounds of vibrant, modulated color that accentuate the convoluted shapes and swirls of their hard surfaces.