Feb 23, 2010 - Sale 2203

Sale 2203 - Lot 3

Price Realized: $ 7,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
RICHARD L. BROWN (1893 - 1917)
An Indian Mound.

Watercolor, circa 1914. 325x500 mm; 13 1/4x19 3/4 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower left.

Provenance: private New York collection.

Exhibited: Students Artists' Exhibition, Doll & Richards, Inc., with the printed gallery exhibition label, inscribed with the year, name, title and artist's Boston address, "676 Shawmut Ave, Boston" in ink, affixed to the frame back.

This fine, luminous watercolor is only the second artwork by this exceptional, early 20th century painter to come to auction. Swann Galleries sold the gouache, Mt. Monadnock, at auction on October 8, 2009.

With his life cut short at the age of 24, works by Richard Lonsdale Brown are very scarce. James Porter described Brown and Lenwood Morris in his Modern Negro Art as "two of the most talented men of this epoch who died in mid-career before fulfilling early promises." This pastel also establishes the artist's move to Boston after his 1912 Ovington Brothers solo exhibition in New York--documented in the article "Negro Youth Amazes Artists by his Talent" in the March 12, 1912 issue of The New York Times.