Apr 05, 2018 - Sale 2472

Sale 2472 - Lot 23

Price Realized: $ 18,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
LOÏS MAILOU JONES (1905 - 1998)
Fishing Shacks, Menemsha.

Watercolor on wove paper, mounted on thin board, 1941. 345x508 mm; 14x20 inches. Signed and dated in watercolor, lower right.

Provenance: private collection, California.

Exhibited: The Barnett Aden Gallery, Washington, DC, with the gallery label, titled and signed by the artist in ink, on a fragment of the frame backing paper. Loïs Mailou Jones had a solo exhibition at this important gallery in 1944. Founded in 1943 by James V. Herring and Alonzo J. Aden, it was the first African-American owned private gallery and gave solo exhibitions to such artists as Elizabeth Catlett, David Driskell, John Farrar and Alma Thomas.

This charming view of Menemsha is a scarce, early example of the artist's painting on Martha's Vineyard. Menemsha's docks were an important subject to the artist and one which she revisited many times over a 60-year period. Jones knew the area well--as an artist, beginning with her first oil landscapes in the late 1930s, and from her youth through her family's many ties to the area. Her Indian Shops, Gay Head, Massachusetts, 1940, is in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.