?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
WINSLOW HOMER Spring:The Shepherdess of Houghton Farm.
Pen and ink on cream wove paper, 1906. 125x200 mm; 5x7 Ex-collection Lloyd Goodrich, former Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
With--A signed, 3 page letter from Homer (1836-1910) to the New York art dealer William Clausen, dated December 3, 1906, thanking him for a check and asking him to have a frame prepared for his painting Spring: The Shepherdess of Houghton Farm. In the letter Homer describes the painting, indicating it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1879 and that he then cut it down to a smaller size (evidently for a more pleasing composition). He asks Clausen to have a new frame made to fit the smaller-sized painting.
Homer's Spring: The Shepherdess of Houghton Farm, painted in 1878-79, was exhibited at the National Academy of Design's 54th annual exhibition in 1879. After Homer reduced it in size and reworked it in 1906, the painting was with Knoedler Gallery in New York (offered for $2000). Knoedler returned the painting to Homer on November 19, 1909. The painting passed to Homer's affluent older brother, Charles S. Homer, Jr., after Homer's death in 1910. It was later in several private collections through the early 1900s, when it was sold from David Findlay Gallery to a private collection, its current location, in 1940.
See Lloyd Goodrich, edited and expanded by Abigail Booth Geerdts, Record of Works by Winslow Homer, New York, 2008, volume III, page 198, number 772 (illustrated page 446).
