LATE 19TH CENT. PERIOD O/C PORTRAIT BOSTON VICTORIAN LADY, W/ORIG FRAMER\'S LABEL
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LATE 19TH CENT. PERIOD O/C PORTRAIT BOSTON VICTORIAN LADY, W/ORIG FRAMER\'S LABEL:
$650.00
LATE 19TH CENTURY PERIOD OIL ON LINEN PORTRAIT OF A BOSTON VICTORIAN LADY, DRESSED IN PERIOD BACK DRESS,W/ORIGINAL FRAMER\'S LABEL ON STRETCHER(Circa 1875-1900)This wonderful late 19th century period oil on linen portrait of a Bostonian, Victorian patrician lady, dressed in period late Victorian dress, has a very painterly surface and the handling of the face, flesh, lips and eyes, point to an academically trained artist. This is no \'Sunday painting.\' Since it was done on prepared linen, instead of canvas, this points to the work being artist-prepared and done by a professional, trained artist. It has been reframed in a replacement 1960\'s ornate gold figured frame. The stretcher is original to the oil painting and hasn\'t been cut down or laid down. It is stretched onto the stretcher wooden frame, as it was done when it was painted. Only the frame is not original to the piece. It has the original \'Frost & Adams, Cornhill, Boston, Massachusetts\' picture framer\'s original paper label, affixed with glue to the back of the stretcher. An exhibition paper label dried and has been subsequently torn off the stretcher. There is one spot of paint loss in the field, crazing & heavy \'alligatoring\' in the background but fortunately, not within the face or the body of the figure. This period Boston, Massachusetts\' oil on linen, was contemporary to the famous Boston painter John Singer Sargent\'s world and the group of Boston-based Post-Impressionist portrait painters, would have been known to each other. This painting was most likely commissioned by a patrician family of means and the sitter was most likely a woman from a well-heeled, patrician Boston family, who had the economic means to commission a portrait in oil of a young matriarch. The \'Frost & Adams, Cornhill, Boston\' artist\'s picture framers and portrait preparers, were well-known to the elite Boston portrait painters of their day, including John Singer Sargent and his contemporaries active at that time. They painted the \'one-percenters,\' and they were paid handsomely to do it. Many rebelled against this allegiance and dependency upon the ruling class of patrician Bostonians, who collected Barbizon School of European landscape paintings, rather than the Post-Impressionist and fresh, experimental and more dangerous Modernist works coming out of Paris, collected by New Yorkers. This oil on linen is the last hurrah of the Boston patrician ruling class and the testimony to their concerns and tastes. Culturally, it shows the split between New York and Boston and the shift from an inward-looking patrician class to an outward-looking patrician class emerging in New York City, which would eventually supplant Paris, as the art collecting center of the world. This painting however, is a celebration of the late 19th Century Boston school of portrait painting, where there was such an acute class divide and little barefoot children played on the streets of Roxbury and Dorchester, while patrician ladies and their husbands of means, strolled out on Boston Common and sat to have their portraits painted in one of Boston\'s portrait studios. This painting, as many like it, is the nexus of this Dickensian, \'Tale of Two Cities.\' It is however, at least with this artist\'s plastic treatment, human, universal, extremely sensitive and felt. It is an extraordinary human portrait and exhibits genuine tenderness and sublime human emotion and experience. It is being offered \'as-is,\' \'as-found\' and in 100% original and untouched condition. Extraordinary and powerful. You can almost feel and touch the sitter\'s personality and human presence. Magnificent.
DIMENSIONS:23½ Height x 17½ Width x 1 ¼\" Depth (frame actual size)Canvas (Linen) size: 14 x 20 (with original framer company label, \'Frost & Adams\' Cornhill, Boston)
CONDITION:Good/Very Good overall vintage condition(*Please scroll down to see enlarged photos. Thank you.)
LATE 19TH CENT. PERIOD O/C PORTRAIT BOSTON VICTORIAN LADY, W/ORIG FRAMER\'S LABEL:
$650.00