Dec 06, 2018 - Sale 2495

Sale 2495 - Lot 97

Price Realized: $ 6,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
JOHN FORD CLYMER.
The Perfect Christmas Tree. Watercolor and gouache on paper, circa 1930. 268x475 mm; 10 1/2x18 3/4 inches. Signed in lower right corner. Glue residue along outer edges and on verso.

Additional Details

A beautiful winter landscape by Clymer, most likely an early version of the illustration for the story "Home for Christmas" by Dorothy Canfield, published in This Week magazine, December 24, 1939. The composition is very similar to fellow American illustrator Dale Nichols's winter landscape "Bringing Home the Tree," and related images featuring the Nebraska farmstead where he was raised. Clymer, himself, was was a great lover of nature, especially the Canadian, Alaskan, and American wilderness, which he incorporated into the many story illustrations and covers he created throughout his career.

In the 1930s, he studied with N.C. Wyeth at the Old Howard Pyle School in Wilmington, Delaware, at the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, Ontario, and with Harvey Dunn in Connecticut. After decades of commercial illustration, he dedicated himself to fine art painting and returned to his love of the natural world, chronicling the Northwestern Indians and their territory, winning several awards in the field of Western art.