?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
JOHN LA FARGE The Sphinx.
Gouache, watercolor and black chalk on paper, 1864-65. 120x180 mm; 4 1/2x7 inches. Initialed and dated in black ink, lower right recto. Signed, titled and annotated extensively in black ink, verso.
One of a number of works that La Farge made to illustrate Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem, The Sphinx (this image was never published).
With Doll and Richards, Boston, 1902-03; with Macbeth Gallery, New York, 1909; ex-collection the estate of the artist, New York, 1911; sold American Art Association, New York, March 29-31, 1911, lot 602; F. Burrall Hoffman Jr, New York and Hobe Sound, until 1980.
Exhibited "Private Sale of Water Color Paintings by Mr. John La Farge, Mr. Childe Hassam, Miss Lucy S. Conant," Doll and Richards, Boston, November, 1902, no. 3; and "Exhibition Records of the Century Association," New York, December 4, 1909 (not numbered).
Published in Watercolors by La Farge, Hassam and Lucy Conant, Boston Evening Transcript, November 25, 1902, page 11; and A Boston Exhibition by Three Artists, Boston Herald, November 26, 1902, page 9.
According to Dr. James L. Yarnall, "This is one of La Farge's most experimental watercolors of the 1860s. Mixing chalk, watercolor and gouache, he developed the kind of heavy-laden, expressive and painterly surface effects that came to characterize his watercolors after 1880."
