?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 150,000 - $ 250,000
HENRY OSSAWA TANNER (1859 - 1937) Moonrise by Kasbah (Morocco).
Oil on linen canvas, 1912. 540x724 mm; 21 1/2x28 1/2 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Chicago; William McBride, Chicago; Patrick Jones, Chicago; Chessie Jones, Chicago; Aaron Galleries, Chicago; Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago (2007).
A photograph of the painting is the Henry Ossawa Tanner papers, the Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, stamped "Frederick O. Bemm, Photographer Art Institute Chicago" and inscribed "'Morocco' by Henry O. Tanner, Paris" and "In private collection. Chicago" in ink, verso.
Exhibited: Exhibition of Paintings by Henry O. Tanner, Thurber Art Galleries, Chicago, February 1913. This was Tanner's second solo exhibition at the Thurber Galleries. In 1913, after Chicago, the exhibition traveled to the Milwaukee Art Gallery, March 6-16 and the John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, March 21-31 and finally M. Knoedler Galleries, New York in April. We believe this painting is Moonrise by Kasbah due to its particular view of the outside walls, architecture unlike Tanner's identifiable Tangier subjects, and that by the time of the New York exhibition, Moonrise by Kasbah was no longer on the checklist.
Tanner travelled to Tangier and other cities in Morocco in 1912. This painting shows figures outside the stark, steep exterior walls of a Moroccan kasbah. The Thurber checklist includes seven titles of the eleven Morrocan paintings that suggest nocturnes or moonlit subjects. From that list, we have located the following four paintings: Moonlight - Old Buildings (near Ka-hak), collection of Lewis Tanner Moore, Moonrise- Walls of Tangier, collection of LACMA, Los Angeles,Moonlight - Hebron, collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum and Moonrise - (Walls of) Tangier, collection of Hamilton College, Clinton, NY.
