Jan 30, 2020 - Sale 2528

Sale 2528 - Lot 2

Price Realized: $ 10,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
WILLIAM EDOUARD SCOTT (1884 - 1964)
Untitled (Boy with Pumpkins in a Field).

Oil on linen canvas, 1929. 464x565 mm; 18 1/4x22 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.

Provenance: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago.

This charming landscape is a scarce depiction of the rural South by William Edouard Scott. From Indianapolis, Scott first trained at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1904-08, and under the mentorship of his friend Henry Ossawa Tanner, studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1909-10. Scott made two more trips to Paris and London between 1911-1914, and his painting La Pauvre Voisine was celebrated at the Grand Salon in Paris in 1912. When he returned from Europe, he repeatedly toured the South seeking to paint rural scenes that were not typical of the landscape genre. In 1915, he also studied at the Tuskegee Institute as the guest of Booker T. Washington, painting the portraits of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. This particular landscape was painted mid-career, just a few years before Scott was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Foundation scholarship in 1931 to study and paint the African beliefs and customs that had survived in Haiti.