?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
WILLIAM PERKINS BABCOCK In the Boudoir.
Oil on wood panel, 1853. 331x246 mm; 13x9 3/4 inches. Initialed and dated in oil, lower left recto.
Provenance: Acquired Mystic Fine Arts, Connecticut, July 2, 1998, lot 144, by the current owner, private collection, Massachusetts.
Babcock (1826-1899) painted several variations of this theme, variably entitled La Toilette and The Jewel Box. One of the paintings was shown at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, another, with a blonde young woman, sold at the American Art Gallery, New York, April 15-16, 1919, to benefit the American Committee for Devastated France, a relief organization for the recovery of the French in the aftermath of World War I.
Babcock (1826-1899) was an expatriate artist, born in Boston, he spent most of his career in Paris. He became one of the first Americans to study with the French painter Thomas Couture (who also taught Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, and others) in Paris. Babcock also worked in and around the village of Barbizon, outside Paris, where, along with other American artists, he specialized in peasant genre paintings. He became associated with Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), a leading Barbizon painter. Babcock introduced fellow artist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) to Millet, and, in turn, Hunt became a strong exponent of the Barbizon School of painting in America.
