LOUIS B. SLOAN (1932 - 2008) Untitled (Winter Landscape).
Oil on canvas, 1958. 914x1118 mm; 36x44 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, Philadelphia; Ethel V. Ashton, Philadelphia; thence by descent to the current owner. Ashton was a Philadelphia artist and librarian at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art for many years. She was a mentor to Louis Sloan and many other young artists at the Academy. She was also a friend and classmate of the artist Alice Neel.
This minimalist landscape is an excellent, early tonal painting by this influential Philadelphia landscape artist. Sloan was in between being a painting student and a professor at PAFA when he painted this dark winter scene. Other early landscapes of his, like Gathering Storm, circa 1961, share a similar somber palette. This is the largest and only the second significant 1950s work by this artist to come to auction since Swann Galleries sold Self-Portrait, 1956, on October 8, 2009.
