?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 75,000 - $ 100,000
ROBERT S. DUNCANSON (1821 - 1872) Winter Landscape.
Oil on canvas, 1860. 610x915 mm; 24x36 inches. Signed, dated and inscribed "Cinci., O" in oil, lower right.
Provenance: obtained at Closson's, Cincinnati, in the 1950s; thence by descent to a private Ohio collection; obtained by the current owner in 2010.
Winter Landscape is a large and wonderful example of important 19th-century painter Robert S. Duncanson's landscapes, and a wonderful early view of Cincinnati. The son of a biracial tradesman from Virginia, and the grandson of a freed slave, Duncanson apprenticed in his youth to his family's housepainting and carpentry business in Canada. Duncanson moved to Cincinnati in the 1840s. A self-taught artist, he began his career by copying popular prints.
This painting has a complexity and richness to its composition with the various scenes of activity--from the fishing hole in the foreground to the farmhouse in the center and the ice skaters and the view of the city in the distance. The progression of scale and detail show the growing sophistication and devices that Duncanson could employ in his landscapes by 1860. Duncanson painted a smaller pair of landscapes, Summer and Winter, in 1849, that depict an abbreviated version of this scene--a farm house with a much tighter view of the Ohio River in the two seasons (both were sold at Sotheby's, New York, in 2003).
In the 1850s, Duncanson received extensive patronage and commercial success, and by April of 1853, he was able to embark on a "Grand Tour" with fellow Cincinnati artist William Sonntag through Europe. This two-year trip was a considerable achievement, the first such pilgrimage for an African-American artist. By 1860, Duncanson was well established as an artist in Cincinnati and had received numerous commissions. But the Civil War seemed imminent in December that year when, according to Joseph D. Ketner, he also began his ambitious Lotus Easters, 1861. Inspired by the Tennyson poem, it reflected his desire for peace. Ketner p. 17.
