Oct 18, 2012 - Sale 2290

Sale 2290 - Lot 17

Price Realized: $ 7,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
LOÏS MAILOU JONES (1905 - 1998)
Menemsha by the Sea.

Watercolor, 1930. 368x495 mm; 14 1/4x19 1/2 inches. Signed and dated in watercolor, lower right recto. Signed in watercolor, upper right verso.

Provenance: collection of the artist, with her 17th Street Washington, DC address label on the frame back; thence by descent to the Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.

Exhibited: Loïs Mailou Jones Retrospective, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 11 - April 15, 1973; Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, Chicago, July 28 - September 29, 1980; Against All Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, the Newark Museum, Newark, January 13 - April 15, 1990; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, May 7, 1990 - July 9, 1990, with the labels on the frame back.

This beautiful Martha's Vineyard landscape is of an area that Jones knew well from her youth. Her grandmother worked as a housekeeper and nanny on the Vineyard, and had saved up to purchase land in Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, where Jones began spending summers in 1906. Her parents also purchased a summer home there in 1909, and Jones spent every summer on the picturesque waterfront. She maintained ties to the community while studying graphic design and art in Boston. In 1928, she finished her graduate studies at the Designers Art School of Boston. Later that year, she attended a summer session at Harvard University while working as a freelance textile designer for F.A. Foster Company. Jones had a body of watercolors from the Vineyard and a solo exhibtion at Oak Bluffs before joining the faculty of Howard University in 1930.