Watercolor, brush and ink on wove paper, circa 1947-8. 470x610 mm; 18 1/2x24 inches. Signed in ink, lower left.
Provenance: ACA Galleries, New York, with the label on the frame back; private Pennsylvania collection.
Romare Bearden took the heroic theme of the Trojan war in Homer's Iliad for a series of watercolors painted after 1945. Bearden had two other literary themes in his post-war work, from Rabelais' 16th Century satire Gargantua and Pantagruel and Federico García Lorca's 1935 Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejía poem. Each watercolor is made around a fluid ink drawing; this work is a very close variant to the watercolor sold at Swann Galleries on March 7, 2006. Ruth Fine, The Art of Romare Bearden, National Gallery of Art, pp. 17-18.
