?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 40,000
ALLAN FREELON (1895 - 1960) Baiting Trawls.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1930-1935. 762x914 mm; 30x36 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed in oil, upper right verso.
Provenance: Gimbel Galleries, Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, with the label on the stretcher bars; private collection, Maryland.
This beautiful painting is the finest and largest work by Allan Freelon we have handled. Just before he graduated from the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, Freelon began visiting the artist colony of Gloucester and painting there around the summer of 1924. He continued to visit there each summer - finding views of the busy docks in the fishing port and the side streets in town - through the early 1930s. Baiting Trawls was most likely painted after his two-year study at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from 1927-1930 where he studied Impressionism. This post-Impressionist view down upon the fishing boats and the harbor's waters epitomizes Freelon's interest in light and color. The harmonious palette of colors and the flattened perspective echo what Freelon would have seen in the work of Gauguin, Bonnard and Van Gogh in Philadelphia museums.
