Feb 06, 2007 - Sale 2102

Sale 2102 - Lot 34

Price Realized: $ 31,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
LÖIS M. JONES (1905 - 1988)
Circus Tents.

Oil on canvas, 1941. 530x650 mm; 21x25 1/2 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed and inscribed "1858 Calif. St., Wash. D.C." in charcoal verso. With a partially torn, typed gallery label on the verso, and numerous inscriptions on the stretcher bars.

Provenance: Collection of Constance Porter-Uzelac, daughter of James A. Porter.

Exhibited: National Academy of Design, New York, 1944.

Illustrated: The Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones, Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, p. 59.

Löis Jones returned to Howard University from Paris in 1938, to continue her career as a painter. In 1941, she submitted Indian Shops, Gay Head, Massachusetts from 1940 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art via a friend in order to bypass their ban on submissions by black artists. It won the prestigious Robert Woods Bliss Prize for Landscape. Her success continued with multiple exhibitions through the 1940s and 1950s, including the inclusion of this work in the National Academy of Design's 1941 exhibition; Jones had shown her works there five times. Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, The Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones, p. 49.