?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
EDWARD MORAN Ship in a State of Distress: An Allegory of the Civil War.
Oil on canvas. 455x810 mm; 18x32 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto.
Ex-collection Burt Chernow, Westport, Connecticut; Harvey Koizim, Westport, Connecticut; Collection of the County Federal Bank, Westport, Connecticut; private collection, Fairfield County, Connecticut, circa 1987.
Moran (1829-1901) emigrated from England to the United States in the 1840s and lived through the turbulence of the mid-19th century and the Civil War. He came from a prominent family of American artists; two of his brothers were Thomas Moran (1837-1926), the painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School, and Peter Moran (1841-1914, see lot 27).
In this work by Moran, which allegorizes a country torn apart by civil war, there is a fallen mast that floats in the harbor while the crew gathers on the deck around the remnants of the mast. There is a solitary figure who represents President Abraham Lincoln on the main deck. The flag lies inverted, a mariner's sign of distress, high in the rigging above.
