?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
HAYWOOD "BILL" RIVERS (1922 - 2002) The Birds.
Oil on canvas, circa 1948-51. 560x320 mm; 22x13 inches. 6-inch vertical mark, lower center.
Provenance: the artist, Paris; James and Laura M. Kleege, New York; thence by descent to the current owner. Inscribed with the artist's name, title and Laura Kleege's name and New York address in ink on stretcher bars. James Kleege, New York painter and printmaker in Stanley W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris, befriended Haywood "Bill" Rivers during his time in Paris. The family supplied this image of the artist painting this work.
This is the first of the very scarce, early figurative work of Haywood "Bill" Rivers to come to auction--we have located only three other figurative works from the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Haywood "Bill" Rivers left his family as a young teen and moved to Baltimore. He later moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League from 1946-48. Rivers left for Paris in 1949 and joined the cooperative Galerie Huit. He then studied at the École du Louvre in Paris from 1950-52. Rivers went on to receive many awards for his work, including the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948 and the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1952. His two solo exhibitions--in 1948, at the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art, and in 1983 at the Ann Weber Gallery in Georgetown, ME--bookend a long, distinguished career. Today, his works are found in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and La Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris. The Baltimore Museum's The Drape Maker and Tailor Shop, both acquired from his 1948 exhibition, are currently included in the traveling museum exhibition, A Force for Change: African American Art and the Rosenwald Fund.
