Charles Sprague Pearce

Acquired by the great-uncle of the present owner

Thence by descent

Born in Boston, Charles Sprague Pearce joined fellow American expatriate artists such as Elizabeth Gardner, Mary Cassatt and James Abbot MacNeill Whistler and moved to Paris in 1882, working in the studio of Léon Bonnat, just as John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins had before him. In August 1884, Pearce purchased a farm in Auvers-sur-Oise, a town some twenty miles northwest of Paris on the banks of the Oise river, where he would live for the next three decades, painting in his glass-enclosed outdoor studio which allowed him to work under all weather conditions. While many other artists had worked in the area, including Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, and Camille Pissarro (in nearby Pontoise), this relocation more closely aligned Sprague Pearce with his French Naturalist contemporaries. As Mary Lublin writes:

"[The] northeastern area of France was especially fertile for naturalists, with each artist devoted to his own coin de terre. Jules Breton was identified with Courrières… [Jules] Bastien-Lepage with Damvilliers… [Pascal-Adolphe-Jean] Dagnan-Bouveret worked in the Franche-Comté… [and] in Auvers, Pearce began his examination of the ways of nature in earnest"

MARY LUBLIN, 'A RARE ELEGANCE: THE PAINTINGS OF CHARLES SPRAGUE PEARCE,' EXH. CAT., 1993, P. 33

The artist enjoyed great success throughout his career focusing on historical narratives, biblical subjects and scenes from rural life in northern France for which he received medals at the Paris Salon, was awarded the French Legion d’honneur, was decorated with the Order of Leopold, Belgium, the Order of the Red Eagle, Prussia, and the Order of the Dannebrog, Denmark. 

While Sprague Pearce was strongly influenced by the predominant European artistic currents of the period, he helped organize the first large scale American art exhibition at the 1894 Antwerp World’s Fair which strongly contributed to the propagation and appreciation of American art in Europe.

This sensitive portrait displays all of the naturalistic qualities that aligned Pearce’s later work with his rural contemporaries such as Bastien-Lepage and Jules Breton, and is rendered in a harmonious and soft palette that is immediately recognizable as the artist's.