?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 12,000 - $ 18,000
WILLIAM GLACKENS Le Royal Conti-Isle Adam.
Oil on canvas, circa 1926. 380x507 mm; 15x20 inches.
Ex-collection the estate of the artist; thence by descent to Ira Glackens, the artist's son; private collection, New York; sold Shannon's Fine Art Auctioneers, Milford, April 26, 2012, with the label on the frame back; private collection, New York.
Glackens (1870-1938) was born in Philadelphia and educated at the prestigious Central High School alongside Ashcan artist John Sloan and famed collector Albert C. Barnes (for whom he later was an art advisor). At age 21, he began working as an artist-reporter and taking classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; during this time Sloan introduced him to Robert Henri (1865-1929), and the two traveled through Europe from 1895 until 1896 when Glackens moved to New York City. He began working as a magazine illustrator at different publications while simultaneously practicing oil painting at the encouragement of Henri. Glackens became a member of a group of artists known as the Eight Independent Painters or The Eight Secessionists, and later just The Eight, headed by Henri, the spiritual leader of American Realism at the time and a lifetime crusader against the artistic establishment, along with other Philadelphian artists with illustration backgrounds—John Sloan, George Luks and Everett Shinn. The circle was rounded out by the older and more established Impressionists and Post-Impressionists Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast and Arthur B. Davies.
Glackens' painting style began to shift away from the muted, Ashcan-inspired palette of his earlier works to a more Impressionistic embrace of light and color around 1910, emblematic of his keen observation of the works of Cézanne and Renoir.
A popular motif that Glackens chose to depict sporadically from the 1890s-1930s was the beach and its activities. One of his most extensive forays into this motif was a series of impressive canvases he completed while he vacationed with his family around Bellport, Long Island during the years 1911-16. Le Royal Conti—Isle Adam relates to a group of paintings, many depicting bathers on a popular beach outside of Paris, on the Oise River, where Glackens and his family lived during the summers of 1926-28.
