CHARLES SPRAGUE PEARCE | Young Girl of Auvers-sur-Oise

The Jordan-Volpe Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in 1993

New York, The Jordan-Volpe Gallery, A Rare Elegance: The Paintings of Charles Sprague Pearce, October 23-December 4, 1993, no. 29

Lined. The surface presents well, aside from a barely perceptible web of fine, stable craquelure on the girl's face and dress. Pin point accretion in background at upper left. A few faint areas of frame abrasion visible along the right and upper edges. Under UV: broad fluorescence is visible near the lower left corner. There are finely applied lines of inpainting visible on her jaw, nose and front part of her forehead; and a 1/4 inch long area of inpainting on top of her head. There is also a 2 1/2 inch line of finely applied inpainting to address prior frame abrasion along right lower edge.
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Born in Boston, Charles Sprague Pearce joined fellow expatriate artists and moved to Paris in 1882, working in the studio of Léon Bonnat, just as John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins had before him. He enjoyed great success throughout his career, receiving medals at the Paris Salon, was awarded the French Legion d’honneur, and was decorated with the Order of Leopold, Belgium, the Order of the Red Eagle, Prussia, and the Order of the Dannebrog, Denmark. In August 1884, Sprague Pearce purchased a farm in Auvers-sur-Oise, a town some twenty miles northwest of Paris on the banks of the Oise river. 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… Bastien-Lepage with Damvilliers… Dagnan-Bouveret worked in the Franche-Comté… [and] in Auvers, Pearce began his examination of the ways of nature in earnest" (A Rare Elegance: The Paintings of Charles Sprague Pearce, New York, 1993, p. 33). This sensitive portrait displays all of the naturalistic qualities that aligned Pearce with his rural contemporaries, and is rendered in a harmonious and soft palette that is immediately recognizable as the artist's.