Jan 27, 2022 - Sale 2593

Sale 2593 - Lot 183

Price Realized: $ 2,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000

WILLIAM MEYEROWITZ (1887-1981)


Self-Portrait.
Oil on canvas. 1015x760 mm; 40x30 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Circa 1930.

Provenance: acquired from the artist, 1970s by the current owner, private collection, Washington, DC.

Meyerowitz was born in the Ukraine, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1908. While a student at the National Academy of Design in New York, he sang in the choir at the Metropolitan Opera, and music remained an important influence in his work; he would frequent Harlem jazz clubs along with Stuart Davis (1892-1964). In addition to his New York genre scenes, he and his wife, the painter Theresa Bernstein (1895-2002), were involved with the circle of artists in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where they spent their summers painting landscape and maritime scenes.

During the Great Depression, Meyerowitz was a mural painter for the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. His work of that era includes "The Post Road in Connecticut," a 1937 oil on canvas mural still extant in the historic post office in Clinton, Connecticut.