?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
RUSSELL COWLES Western Landscape with Horses.
Charcoal on tracing paper. 517x800 mm; 20 1/2x31 1/2 inches. Signed and annotated in pencil, lower margin.
Ex-collection private collection, New Jersey.
Cowles (1887-1979) was born in Iowa to a creative family; his father was the owner of a newspaper, and later became publisher of the "Des Moines Register," and his mother had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and she encouraged his artistic pursuits from a young age. Cowles studied art at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, The Art Students League in New York, and the American Academy in Rome, Italy. He was influenced by Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, though he filtered these influences through the lenses of Western and American Realism and Regionalism.
After studying Chinese traditional painting and experimenting with semi-Abstract compositions, in the 1930s he began living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, spending time with other American artists such as John Marin (see lot 119), Bror J. O. Nordfeldt (see lot 194) and Marsden Hartley (see lot 127). He approached his landscape and figure subjects "sensitively — to feel what nature has to say." His delicacy of form is exhibited in the musculature of the horses in the foreground while the idyllic landscape speaks to the artist's background in American Modernism and Realism.
