?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
DOX THRASH (1892 - 1965) Old Barns.
Aquatint, circa 1937-38. 227x302 mm; 9x11 7/8 inches, 1/2-1 1/2 inch margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Federal Art Project, WPA, Philadelphia, recorded in the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. A very good, dark impression with richly-inked areas of aquatint and inky plate edges of this very scarce print.
Only two other impressions in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and one in the inventory of Allan H. Nowak, are known of this aquatint. The work was dated by the record of its submission (and rejection) for an exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in November 1938.
Possibly a childhood memory of growing up in Georgia, Dox Thrash shows in this aquatint both his experimental technique and an unromantic view of the black experience in rural America. According to Ittman, Dox Thrash began experimenting early with aquatint, only shortly after his instructor Earl Horter in the early 1930s. Both artists were inspired by the work of Goya - Horter owned a copy of his famous series the Caprichos. Dox Thrash is credited for later inventing the process of carborundum printing with Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher; together they perfected the process in Horter's print class at the Philadelphia Graphic-Sketch Club. Ittmann 53.
