?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
LOÏS MAILOU JONES (1905 - 1998) Fishing Smacks, Menemsha, Massachusetts.
Oil on linen canvas, 1960. 406x991 mm; 16x39 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist (1981); thence by descent to a private collection, Washington, DC.
Exhibited: National Museum of Art, Washington, DC, 1961, winner of the First Oil Award A.A.L, with the brass plaque on the frame.
This award-winning oil painting is one of the largest known landscapes by Loïs Mailou Jones to portray Martha's Vineyard. Menemsha's docks were an important subject to the artist and one which she revisited many times over a 60-year period. Jones knew the area well--as an artist, beginning with her first oil landscapes in the late 1930s, and from her youth through her family's ties to the area. 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, and throughout her long and distinguished career. Her Indian Shops, Gay Head, Massachusetts, 1940, is in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
