?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
HAROLD WESTON Landscape with a Farm.
Gouache on reddish brown paper, 1940. 253x362 mm; 10x14 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in gouache, lower right recto, and dedicated in pencil on a label. With a sketch in white chalk, verso.
Provenance: Private collection, New York.
Weston (1894-1972) was born in Merion, Pennsylvania and spent his childhood exploring the Adirondacks and traveling abroad. As a teenager, Weston became afflicted with polio. Though doctors believed that Weston would be permanently unable to walk, the young artist defied these expectations and even graduated from Harvard University in 1912. After traveling with the British Army to India and Mesopotamia as a YMCA volunteer during World War I, Weston briefly settled in New York before setting off for the Adirondacks again. After a couple of years away in relative rugged isolation, Weston returned to New York and showed his oil sketches from his travels at Montross Gallery in 1922 to much acclaim. Weston would continue to travel and paint, living in France from 1926 to 1930, but would remain connected to his home in St. Huberts in the Adirondacks. After the Great Depression forced Weston and his young family to return to the United States, he became employed as a mural painter by the Treasury Relief Art Project. In his mid to late career, Weston was active, and often led, service organizations and artist societies. Celebrated as an advocate and an artist, Weston was one of the founders of the National Council on Arts and Government in 1955. The Council later won passage of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, which created the National Endowment for the Arts.
