Feb 06, 2007 - Sale 2102

Sale 2102 - Lot 85A

Price Realized: $ 40,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
AARON DOUGLAS (1899 - 1979)
The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

Oil on masonite board, 1961. 410x515 mm; 16x20 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.

Provenance: gift from the artist; hence by descent to the current owner.

Aaron Douglas rose to prominence as the first great artist of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s with his stylized, Egyptian and Art Deco-inspired figuration. In the 1930s, he worked on mural panels for the WPA, and his God's Trombones series of paintings. He pursued landscapes and portraits in a post-Impressionist palette and style throughout his time in Nashville, Tennessee, where he moved from New York in 1937. Douglas was a professor and finally the head of the art department at Fisk University until his retirement in 1966. The artist frequently visited New York, and kept his apartment in Harlem while teaching at Fisk University.