?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
JOHN LA FARGE Boy Casting off a Hawk.
Watercolor and gouache over pencil on paper, circa 1884-85. 134x121 mm; 5 1/4x4 3/4 inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto.
Provenance: Moore's Art Gallery, New York, with a partial label; private collection, New Jersey; Henry B. Holt, Essex Fells, New Jersey; Stephen M. Lovette, Washington, D.C.; William Vareika Fine Arts, Ltd., Newport, Rhode Island; private collection, Massachusetts; private collection, Chicago.
Exhibited: Moore's Art Gallery, New York, March 26-27, 1885; "John La Farge (1835-1910) American Artistic Genius and Renaissance Man," William Vareika Fine Arts, Ltd., Newport, Rhode Island, August 28-November 30, 2009.
Published: Yarnall, "New Insights on John La Farge and Photography," The American Art Journal, volume XIX, number 2, 1987, page 73 (illustrated).
Many of the works in the Moore's Art Gallery, New York, auction in 1885 were replicas of pictures that La Farge had sold the previous year in his forced sale at the auctioneers Ortgies & Co., New York. The artist considered making copies both a substitute for keeping works that he did not really want to sell and as a potential future source of income. The current work is based on a watercolor sold in 1884 at Ortgies & Co. (W. 1880.14) that dates from 1880 according to the auction catalogue. Both are based on drawings executed around 1865 as La Farge worked on illustrations for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Skeleton in Armor, a ballad set in Newport, Rhode Island. The backdrop represents Brenton's Cove, Newport, prominently featured in the poem. La Farge's other drawings of the subject are now in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
