?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
WILLIAM EDMONDSON (1874 - 1951) Squirrel.
Stone, circa 1940. Approximately 476x330x127 mm; 18 3/4x13x5 inches.
Provenance: purchased directly from the artist by the owner's late grandmother, Nashville, circa 1940-45; thence by descent to the current owner. The original owners of this squirrel had a pair that guarded the front entrance of their Nashville home in the late 1940s.
This squirrel is a striking work by this important self-taught sculptor, and an excellent example of the remarkable animals and figures he carved out of stone. A native of Nashville and the son of former slaves, William Edmondson opened a yard to carve tombstones from mostly reclaimed limestone curbstones in the early 1930s. He first carved memorial figures of lambs and doves and then more expressive preachers, angels, rams, horses, lions, and other animals. Within the dimensions of the curbstone, Edmondson was able to simplify the forms of animals and figures to convey great power and character. He was "discovered" in 1934-35 by Sidney Hirsch of Vanderbilt University, and in 1936, his friends brought the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe to visit and shoot Edmondson at work. He was then brought to the attention of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Edmondson became the first African-American artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1937. The Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville, with the largest collection of Edmondson sculpture, organized a retrospective exhibition, which traveled nationally in 2000-2001. Bearden/Henderson pp. 349-352.
