Watercolor, gouache, pen and ink, over a printing of the black keystone lithograph, 1979. 650x500 mm; 25 5/8x19 5/8 inches. With the printer's pencil notations and the registration marks in the margins.
With a signed photo-certificate from Nanette Bearden, Romare Bearden's wife, dated October 7, 1994.
Provenance: the artist; Alex Rosenberg Fine Art, New York. This painting was an early study for the same-titled color lithograph. In 1979, Alex Rosenberg and Transworld Publishing Co. printed Firebirds and two other Bearden color lithographs, Conjunction and Pilate. Rosenberg also commissioned and published what are widely considered Bearden's two most important prints--The Train,1973 and The Family, 1975.
Exhibited: Romare Bearden and Herbert Gentry: Tribute to a Friendship, Alitash Kebede Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, May 25 - July 17, 2004, with the label on the frame back.
The same-titled collage from 1975 is in the David C. Driskell Collection, University of Maryland.
