PALMER HAYDEN (1890 - 1973) Untitled (Schooners, Bay of Biscay).
Oil on canvas board, circa 1927. 380x457 mm; 15x18 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection.
In the summer of 1927, Hayden produced a group of oil paintings, watercolors and sketches along the Brittany coast that are rarely seen. This is one of the few known examples of an oil painting from this trip. The boats resemble those in The Schooners, a lost work known only from a black and white photograph in the National Archives, and several sketchbook drawings of boats from Concarneau in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Two years earlier Hayden had painted seascapes of Boothbay Harbor and along the Maine coast, one of which had won the 1925 Harmon Foundation gold medal. With his prize money, he left for Paris, and finally met his idol Henry Ossawa Tanner. Hayden left Paris for the artist colony town of Concarneau that summer and briefly returned to what had given him first success - seascapes. Feininger-Miller pp. 79-81.
