?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
GLORIA VANDERBILT The Doll House.
Acrylic on canvas, 1965. 1016x1524 mm; 40x60 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower right recto, and signed and titled verso.
Provenance: Acquired Hammer Galleries, New York, April 12, 1966, by the current owner, private collection, New York.
Exhibited "Gloria Vanderbilt: Recent Paintings," Hammer Galleries, New York, April 5-16, 1966, number 22 (illustrated).
Published: Gloria Vanderbilt, Woman to Woman Doubleday, Garden City, 1979, page 119.
Vanderbilt (1924-2019), who was a self-taught artist, had her first solo exhibition at the Bertha Shaeffer Gallery, New York, in 1953. Of her work and of its connections with her fraught childhood, Vanderbilt said "I see things with a child's spontaneity . . . I'm now creating a joy that I never had in childhood, in recapturing something that never really happened." In her 1979 autobiography, Woman to Woman, Vanderbilt wrote about her attraction to doll houses. She fantasized about creating her own dollhouse, inspired by Carrie Stettheimer, whose doll house is in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York. The current work seemed to be particularly meaningful to Vanderbilt. More than a decade after she had painted The Doll House, and it had been shown alongside more than 60 of her acrylics, Vanderbilt remembered its significance, "Inside the house is a mother holding a baby and standing beside them, the father wearing a Lincoln top hat. The house belongs to the children. Their parents and the baby are exactly where the children want them."
