Watercolor and pencil on paper, 1916. 202x330 mm; 8x13 inches.
Provenance: Estate of the artist, Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Zabriskie Gallery, New York, with the label; Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., Beverly Hills, with the label; Mark Borghi Fine Art, Inc., New York.
Exhibited: "American Modernism," Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., Beverly Hills, July 2-August 3, 1991; "25 Years of the Demuth: Homage and Hurrah!," The Demuth Foundation and Museum, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, September 15-November 30, 2006.
Demuth (1883-1935) was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and suffered an injury as a child that forced him to walk with a cane. As he was unable to be as physically active as other children, his mother gave him crayons to draw with. His parents supported his art from a young age and he attended Franklin and Marshall College, Drexel University and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. After leaving school, he focused on his preferred medium of watercolor and found inspiration in flowers and plants in his mother's garden, a subject that would preoccupy him throughout his life.
Demuth made his studio at his home in Lancaster, but traveled frequently and made many important friends in the artistic community. He traveled three times to Paris where he studied at the Académie Colarossi and Académie Julian, joined the avant-garde artistic scene, and admired the work of European modernists, even spending time at Gertrude Stein's salon. He met Marsden Hartley while in Paris who later introduced him to Alfred Stieglitz and became part of his tightknit group of artists.
Demuth spent several summers at the artists' colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the mid-1910s and, in 1914, exhibited his watercolors in the Provincetown studio of modernist painter, E. Ambrose Webster.
