LOÏS MAILOU JONES (1905 - 1998) Still Life with Grapefruit.
Oil on canvas board, 1928. 300x445 mm; 11 3/4x17 1/2 inches. Signed and dated "April '29" in oil, lower right.
Provenance: collection of the artist; thence by descent to the Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.
According to a notation on the frame backing, this bright, early still life is the artist's first oil painting, completed a year after she graduated with honors from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There, she studied textile design and painted in tempera and watercolor. In 1928, she finished graduate study 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 began a body of work in oil until joining the faculty of Howard University in 1930. Most of her early still lifes were made during her studies of Cezanne while at the Académie Julian in Paris--Cauliflower and Pumpkin, 1938, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is from this early period. Benjamin p. 125; Messenger p. 21.
