Oil on canvas board, 1937. 406x305 mm; 16x12 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, New York; private collection, California.
Exhibited: The Negro in American Art, UCLA Art Galleries, Dickson Art Center, University of California, Los Angeles, September 11 - October 16, 1966, with the label verso.
Illustrated: Samella Lewis, African-American Art and Artists, fig 40, p. 64; Val Spaulding and Samella Lewis, Black Art, An International Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 2, winter 1976, p. 27.
Mollie is a scarce example of the artist's intimate portraiture from the mid-1930s in New York. Aaron Douglas was painting and exhibiting easel-sized paintings in Harlem through the 1930s. Painted in this Impressionist style, he continued to paint still lifes, portraits and landscapes in his studio when not working on mural and illustration projects. His 1936 portait of his wife Alta, in the collection of Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, and included in the 2008 retrospective Aaron Douglas, African-American Modernist, is painted in a smiliarly direct style. Earle p. 177.
