?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
MOLLY LUCE Salvage.
Oil on canvas, 1938. 510x620 mm; 20x24 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto.
Provenance: Childs Gallery, Boston, with the label; private collection, New York.
Luce (1896-1986) was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. She studied art at Wheaton College and later at the Art Students League, New York under Francis Luis Mora, George Bellows, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Following travels to Europe in the early 1920s, Luce began exhibiting at the Whitney Studio Club, New York; she would show her work there and at its successor organization, the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the annual and biennial exhibitions until 1950. Luce's style through the 1940s earned her the nickname of the "American Bruegel" and is reminiscent of Charles Burchfield, though her later work has a more Precisionist appearance.
