?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 35,000 - $ 50,000
ERNIE BARNES (1938 - 2009) O.J. Simpson.
Oil on canvas, 1969. 914x610 mm; 36x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: commissioned by Edward Hookstratten, Los Angeles, given to Coach John McKay, Los Angeles; thence by descent to the current owner. Edward Hookstratten, a Los Angeles-based sports attorney and agent in 1969, gave this painting to O.J. Simpson's coach at the University of Southern California the year after Simpson won the Heisman Trophy. This painting hung in Coach McKay's office at Heritage Hall at USC until he left to become the head coach of the Tampa Bay Bucaneers in 1976.
This fascinating, powerful painting by Ernie Barnes of a young O.J. Simpson shows the artist's expressive portraiture and closeness to the game of football. Barnes had retired from the NFL as a player himself only four years earlier. Barnes depicts Simpson as muscular and lean, with a scowl--an imposing, almost defiant, figure with the fiery colors of cardinal and yellow both in his uniform and the sky. Sports continued to be an important part of Barnes's work. In 1984, he was named an official artist of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. And in 2004, Barnes was named America's Best Painter of Sports by the American Sport Art Museum & Archives.
