?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
CLOYD LEE BOYKIN (1877 - ND ) Still Life with Flowers.
Oil on board, circa 1940-50. 343x419 mm; 13 1/2x16 1/2 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
This still life is the first known painting by Cloyd Lee Boykin to come to auction. The artist, famously depicted in Palmer Hayden's painting The Janitor Paints a Picture, was indeed a janitor late in his life. Boykin had, however, achieved considerable success as an artist in the 1910s and the 1920s.
Born in Virginia in 1877, Boykin moved to Boston in the early 1900s, where he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1912 to 1913. He became known in Boston's art circles for his portraits of prominent African Americans and abolitionists. In the late 1920s, Boykin also opened the first art school for African Americans in New York City, and went on to exhibit at the Harmon Foundation in New York in 1931, 1933 and 1935.
