Feb 16, 2023 - Sale 2626

Sale 2626 - Lot 136

Price Realized: $ 938
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500

ISABEL BISHOP (1902-1988)


Spectators.
Etching. 177x125 mm; 7x5 inches, full margins. With the artist's signature ink stamp, lower right, and numbered 50/50 in pencil, lower left. Published by the Sylvan Cole Gallery and Midtown Galleries, New York. From Eight Etchings: 1927–1934. 1933 (printed 1989).

A very good impression. Teller 15.

Bishop was born in Cincinnati, though moved often as a child. She began studying art at age 12 in Detroit at the John Wicker Art School. In 1918, she moved to New York and continued her studies at the New York School of Applied Design for Women and the Art Students League where she studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller who greatly influenced her.

She acquired her studio in Union Square in 1926 and become part of a group of artists known as the Fourteenth Street School who depicted the urban environment and its inhabitants in a realist manner. She often depicted the New Woman that first emerged in the 1920s who worked outside the home; her subjects were often shopping, riding the subway and enjoying urban life. She looked towards Old Masters, particularly Dutch and Flemish artists, in how she rendered the form and movement of city dwellers.

In 1938, she worked as a Muralist for the WPA, and completed a mural for the U.S. Post Office in New Lexington, Ohio.