?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
JILL DEGROFF (1954- ) Joseph Mitchell at Sloppy Louie's. Acrylic on canvas, 2020. 1015x763 mm; 40x30 inches. Signed lower left.
In this portrait caricature based on a photograph by Mitchell's wife, Therese, DeGroff remembers the famous literary chronicler of New York City's underbelly, gritty characters, and waterways at his favorite eatery. Beloved by dock workers and white collar workers alike, the legendary South Street Seaport fish restaurant was located in the former Fulton Ferry Hotel. Mitchell immortalized Sloppy Louie's and its owner, his friend Louis Morini, in his famous work Up in the Old Hotel (1952). In the artist's words: "To better understand the world, Joe followed the working hands; the folks who were an integral part of the sea's after-life, be it working the Fulton Fish Market, preparing food from it, or just being in it day after day, year after year . . . he needed to stay connected to this rapidly disappearing world. His glory was to get up close to humanity, to `Get in the habit of looking at people', he said; 'that's the sum of it, really.'"
Jill DeGroff is a fine artist and sought-after caricaturist of the craft cocktail era with a passionate cult following. Inspired by Al Hirschfeld's illustrations of speakeasies in his 1932 book Manhattan Oases, she began painting and sketching in bars and jazz clubs over two decades ago, often accompanying her husband, Dale DeGroff, the James Beard award-winning mixologist and author of The Craft of the Cocktail (and its recent update The New Craft of the Cocktail) and with whom she co-founded the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans in 2004. Her book, Lush Life Portraits from the Bar, (New York, 2009) is an anthology of the colorful characters she met in bars around the world and the tales they told.
