LENWOOD H. MORRIS Untitled (Woman Seated on a Park Bench, with Baby Carriage).
Oil on wood panel, circa 1905-10. 133x102 mm; 5 1/4x4 inches. Signed in pencil, verso. With a painted study of a seated figure, verso.
Lenwood Morris was a student at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts with other African-American artists such as Laura Wheeler Waring and Julian Abele in the early 1900s. His watercolor Woman with Parasol, 1908, is in the Academy's permanent collection. Along with Richard Brown, he also built and decorated parts of the set of the 1916 Philadelphia production of W.E.B. Dubois' historical pageant, Star of Ethiopia.
His 1915-18 oil portrait of the important African-American philosopher, Alain Locke, is in the collection of the Howard University Art Gallery. Morris later exhibited with the Harmon Foundation in the 1930s. Locke described him as one of the "Negro Modernists," who, because he died relatively early, was a "swallow before the proper spring" and a "painter of what for that time were unusually advanced styles of landscape and strong, high key portrait studies." Powell p. 71.
