?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
WINSLOW HOMER Study: Fresh Air.
Pen and black ink on cream laid paper, circa 1879. 200x125 mm; 7 7/8x4 7/8 inches (image); 200x223 mm; 7 7/8x8 3/4 inches (full sheet). Ex-collection the artist James D. Smillie; thence by descent to the current owners.
Drawn by Homer to be illustrated in the American Watercolor Society's twelfth annual exhibition catalogue, New York, 1879 (see also lots 13, 14 and 16).
We are grateful to Abigail Booth Gerdts , director of the Record of the Works of Winslow Homer, for helping to identify this drawing. Gerdts notes, "The catalogue of the American Water Color Society Twelfth Annual Exhibition (held in New York, month of February 1879) included a quantity of thumbnail images referencing--not reproducing--watercolors in the exhibition. These little line drawings were not signed; it may be presumed some were done by the artist of the watercolor represented, and some by other graphic specialists. In this case, there is every indication Homer provided the vignette from his watercolor painting himself. The drawings were done 'normal' size; then photoengraved, and greatly reduced in scale. The image photographically duplicated from the drawing . . . is 3"x2" in size in the Water Color Society's catalogue. James D. Smillie was one of the three-man 'Catalogue Committee' for the exhibition."
Published in Goodrich/Gerdts, Record of the Works of Winslow Homer, volume III, number 757 (listed as "unlocated").
Homer made this pen and ink study from his seminal, same-titled watercolor now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 41.1087). A plein air representation of a fancifully dressed shepherdess at Houghton Farm, the upstate New York property of one of Homer's patrons.
