?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
MERTON SIMPSON (1928 - ) Sea Story #3.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1955-56. 584x762 mm; 23x30 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; thence by descent to a private collection.
Exhibited: John Heller Gallery, New York; Annual State Exhibition, Carolina Art Association, April 1956, with the labels on the verso.
Sea Story #3 is an excellent and early example of this artist's mid-century abstraction. In 1956, Merton Simpson was a young New York painter who had just completed his service in the Air Force, and whose career was on the rise. Two years earlier, Simpson had been included in a group exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery, a watercolor exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the exhibition Younger American Painters at the Guggenheim Museum, all New York.
