?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
PAUL MANSHIP Vivian St. George.
Terracotta, 1924. 305 mm; 12 inches (height), excluding marble base. Signed, dated and dedicated to the sitter's mother, Evelyn St. George, on the underside of the left shoulder.
Provenance: Evelyn St. George, London, 1924; the sitter, Vivian St. George, England; thence by descent; sold Sotheby's, London, July 12, 2017, sale L17230, lot 71; private collection, New York.
The sitter, Vivian St. George was the daughter of Manship's friend, artist Sir William Orpen, and Mrs. Evelyn St. George, a married American banking heiress. When Vivian was twelve years old, her mother commissioned a portrait from Manship, who sculpted the girl as Diana, the bronze Vivian St. George and Her Dog, is now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Manship created other portraits of Vivian in 1924, among them a bronze sketch of the girl running with her dog and a marble portrait bust.
The affair that Evelyn St. George had with the artist Sir William Orpen was widely-rumored at the time. The British press referred to them as "Jack and the Beanstalk" with Evelyn St. George at over six feet tall and Orpen just over five feet tall.
Manship (1885-1966) was an American sculptor born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Among the principal portrait sculptors of the Art Deco period, he is perhaps best remembered for his gilded, cast bronze sculpture of Prometheus, 1934, located above the lower plaza at Rockefeller Center, New York.
