?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
REX GORELEIGH (1902 - 1986) Alain Locke.
Oil on linen canvas, 1974. 584x457 mm; 23x18 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Professor John Ralph Willis, Princeton, NJ; Between the Covers Rare Books, Gloucester City, NJ; the Ness Oleson Trust. The late Frannie Ness and Gary Oleson were the proprietors of Waiting for Godot Books of Hadley, MA, which specialized in rare American and English books, including African American literature.
Princeton Professor John Ralph Willis (1938 - 2007) commissioned this portrait of Alain Locke from his close friend Rex Goreleigh. Willis was an honorary secretary of Princeton University's chapter of the Alain Locke Society. Goreleigh painted it after a 1943-44 portrait of Locke by Betsy Graves Reyneau (1888 - 1964) which is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and was a gift from the Harmon Foundation. Goreleigh's painting is recorded in the Catalog of American Portraits, a research archive of the National Portrait Gallery.
