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A private collector WILLARD LEROY METCALF (1858-1925) Pottery Shop at Tunis, 1887 signed and...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:50,000.00 - 75,000.00 USD
A private collector WILLARD LEROY METCALF (1858-1925) Pottery Shop at Tunis, 1887 signed and...
A private collector
WILLARD LEROY METCALF
(1858-1925)
Pottery Shop at Tunis, 1887
signed and dated "W.L. Metcalf, Tunis 87" (lower left)
oil on canvas
12 x 155/8 in. (30.5 x 39.7 cm) <p>Estimate: $50,000-75,000 <p> Provenance
The artist J. Eastman Chase Gallery, Boston, 1891 Private Collection, Boston Jeffrey Brown, Boston Christie's, New York, June 3, 1982, lot 91 Private Collection, 1982 <p> Exhibited
Boston, St. Botolph Club and Rowland Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings by W.L. Metcalf, March 18-April 1, 1889, no. 30 Boston, J. Eastman Chase's Gallery, Paintings by William Metcalf, March 1889, no. 30 <p> Literature
William L. Metcalf Sketchbook, 1887, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Willard Leroy Metcalf Papers, Reel N70/13, frame 356 William Howe Downes, Boston Evening Transcript, March 21, 1889, 4:5, review of Metcalf's exhibition at the St. Botolph Club, Boston: "The shop of a pot merchant, with earthen and pottery vessels hanging on the wall - a sketch of extremely choice quality." Elizabeth de Veer and Richard Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, New York, 1987, p. 197, no. 231 (illustrated) <p> This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné authored by Dr. Bruce W. Chambers, Ira Spanierman, Dr. William H Gerdts, and Elizabeth de Veer. <p> As of late 1886, Willard Metcalf had already been studying and painting in France for three years. Unlike many of his American classmates at the Academie Julian, Metcalf had yet to submit a painting to the Paris Salon and was still looking for a subject that he felt would win the approval of the jurors. From that December through January, following what had become an established academic tradition of Orientalist views, Metcalf traveled to North Africa, sketching in both Biskra and Tunis. <p>Upon his return to Paris, Metcalf spent the next year developing his sketches into a large painting, the now lost, eight-foot-wide Marché de Kousse-Kousse`a Tunis, or, as Metcalf called it, "My 'Arab Market.'" In May, 1887, he wrote his friend, Will Taylor, in Boston, "I'm going in for the Salon myself this trip." <p>Metcalf was rewarded for his efforts the following spring when his painting was not only accepted into the Salon, but was exhibited in a choice location "on the line" and was awarded an Honorable Mention. "The result," Metcalf later wrote, "was better than I had any reason to hope for."
<p> When Metcalf returned to the United States in early 1889, he brought both the finished painting and his North African sketches with him, exhibiting the entire group of works at Boston's St. Botolph Club in March. William Howe Downes, the critic for the Boston Evening Transcript, praised both the Salon painting and its studies: "This is one of the most unpretending, honest illustrations of Eastern life and light that has been painted in Tunis and Biskra." <p>Downes added that Pottery Shop at Tunis was a "sketch of extremely choice quality." It is also the only one of Metcalf's extant North African studies that the artist chose to incorporate directly into the finished Salon painting, where it occupies the background in the upper right.
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