?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
ROBERT M. JACKSON An Artist.
Oil on linen canvas, 1939. 762x635 mm; 30x25 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; the estate of Walter Simon.
Exhibited: Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings of the New York Negro by Robert M. Jackson, Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC October 1 - November 10, 1940. This exhibition was curated by Alonzo J. Aden, and a foreword was included in the exhibition brochure by Eleanor Roosevelt
This handsome portrait of the painter Walter Augustus Simon is by another distinguished painter. A graduate of Princeton University, Robert Jackson was an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an assistant to the art critic of the N.Y. Tribune. After military service, he studied painting at the Art Students' League. Jackson and Simon (both pictured here in a photograph supplied by the Simon family) were New York artists and close friends. Jackson became known for his portraits of African Americans. He painted portraits of Mrs. Bessye J. Bearden, the mother of Romare Bearden, and Richmond Barthé, which were reproduced on the covers of Opportunity magazine in 1940. The Crisis also reported an earlier 1939 exhibition of his portraits of African Americans at the Charles Morgan Gallery in New York which was attended by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and illustrated his Woman in Red Hat. His work was also included in the 1940 influential Exhibition of The Art of the American Negro at the Tanner Art Galleries in Chicago.
