LAURA WHEELER WARING (1887 - 1948) Still Life with Fruit and Flowers.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1930s. 546x711 mm; 21 1/2x28 inches. Signed in pencil, upper right recto. Inscribed with the artist's studio address "756 N. 43rd St., Philadelphia, PA" in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Philadelphia.
This modernist still life is a scarce example of Laura Wheeler Waring's painting from the early 1930s. It displays Waring's painterly exploration within the bounds of traditional genre painting, and the influence of post-Impressionism on her development. One of her larger and best known works from the period is the exuberant floral painting Still Life, 1928, which was once in the Evan-Tibbs Collection of Washington, DC.
Waring began painting watercolors in her early teens and won several awards before graduating from the Hartford Public High School in 1906 and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in 1914. Her distinguished career included two periods of study in Paris. The first sojourn was interrupted by the beginning of World War I, and she eventually returned to Paris in June 1924. This second period is widely regarded as a turning point in her style as well as her career. Waring painted portraits until October when she enrolled for a year of painting study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she studied with Boutet de Monvel and met Henry Ossawa Tanner and Gwendolyn Bennett - enjoying her "only period of uninterrupted life as an artist with an environment and associates that were a constant stimulus and inspiration. My savings, however, would not allow me to continue this life indefinitely." In addition to the Harmon Foundation in New York, Waring exhibited at the Pyramid Club in Philadelphia and Howard University through the 1940s. Her paintings today are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Howard University. Sharpley-Whiting pp. 86-87.
