?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
CY TWOMBLY Portrait of Thomas Brown Wilber<>.
Oil on canvas, 1950. 875x580 mm; 34½x23 inches. Ex-collection Thomas Brown Wilber, thence by inheritence to the current owner. With a letter documenting the painting of the portrait from Thomas Brown Wilber.
Painted during the spring of 1950, when the sitter was a senior at Virginia Military Institute and Twombly was living in Lexington, Virginia. Twombly's father was the first golf coach and, later, Director of Athletics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, where the artist lived from 1949 to 1950 and studied painting under Marion Jenkin.
Both Wilber and Twombly took Jenkin's beginning course in painting at Washington and Lee, which shares an adjacent hillside location with the Virginia Military Institute, and became friends during their classes. This friendship led to Twombly's painting Wilber. According to Wilber, as the two became friends, he bought several drawings from the artist (see lots 8 and 9) and then asked if Twombly would paint his portrait. Wilber agreed to pay for materials and a sum of approximately $60 for the painting. Although Twombly represented Wilber in his V. M. I. uniform, less his jacket, which might explain the dominant blue tones of the work, the portrait focuses more on the sitter's face than his dress.
Prior to his study at Washington and Lee, Twombly had received his first significant academic training at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he worked under Josef Albers and Ben Shahn (returning there in 1951 and working with Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline). In September, 1950, he moved for a short time to New York and then to Europe, settling in Rome in 1957.
