?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
WILLIAM A. HARPER (1873 - 1910) Untitled (French Landscape).
Oil on canvas, mounted on board, circa 1907-08. 330x406 mm; 13x16 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the Decatur Art Center; Millikan University, Decatur (1969); private collection, Illinois (2020).
William A. Harper painted this beautiful, pastoral landscape on the outskirts of Paris during his second French trip. Like fellow landscape painters Edward M. Bannister and James Bolivar Needham, Harper was born in Canada; his family moved from Ontario to Illinois in 1885. Harper attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1895 - 1901, working as a nightwatch man and janitor to pay for his tuition. Graduating with honors, he then studied in Paris from 1903 - 1905 at the Académie Julian following in Henry Ossawa Tanner's footsteps, and was greatly influenced by the Barbizon School. In 1905, Harper earned the Municipal Art League's blue ribbon at the Art Institute of Chicago for nine of his paintings. On a return trip to France from 1907-08, Harper studied informally with Tanner and his paintings became more Impressionist. Harper's career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis only a few years later at the age of 36. The Art Institute held a memorial exhibition in Harper's honor, showcasing 60 of his works. Today, his paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery (The Evans-Tibbs Collection), the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, the Columbus Museum of Art, the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, the Flint Institute of Fine Arts, Tuskegee University, the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. Barnwell p. 157; Kennedy p. 119.
