?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
RICHARD W. DEMPSEY (1909 - 1987) Boy in the Alley.
Oil on cotton canvas, 1946. 457x610 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist, with a typed exhibition label with the artist's 5032 Just Street, SE address on the stretcher bar, verso.
This charming cityscape is a scarce Washington DC scene by Richard Dempsey, and one of his earliest oil paintings to come to auction. In 1941, Dempsey had moved from Oakland, CA to Washington, DC where studied at Howard University. In 1946, along with Elizabeth Catlett, Dempsey was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to produce a series of 100 portrait paintings of outstanding African Americans. Dempsey painting figuratively through the early 1950s. In 1951, he had taken part in the 1st Annual Exhibition of the Loïs Jones & Celine Tabary Studio Group, which also included Delilah Pierce and Alma Thomas. He was also included in the 10th Annual Exhibition of American Art in 1952 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where he won the purchase award.
