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23036

CHARLSE SPRAGUE PEARCE Home from the Fields

Currency:USD Category:Art Start Price:30,000.00 USD Estimated At:60,000.00 - 80,000.00 USD
CHARLSE SPRAGUE PEARCE Home from the Fields
<B>CHARLES SPRAGUE PEARCE</B></I> (American 1851-1914)<BR><I>Home From The Fields,</B></I> circa 1880-84<BR>Oil on canvas<BR>18 x 11-1/2 inches (45.7 x 29.2 cm)<BR>Signed and inscribed lower left: <I>Charles Sprague Pearce/Paris</B></I><BR>Stamped with artist's monogram on stretcher<BR><BR>Literature:<BR>Julia Rowland Myers, "The American Expatriate Painters of the French Peasantry, 1863-1893," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 1989, p 239, ff 3<BR><BR>Pearce was born and raised in Boston. His grandfather and namesake was the noted poet and banker Charles Sprague, who was a participant in the "Boston Tea Party." After graduating from the Boston Latin School Pearce worked for five years as a merchant in the China trade. During this period he was also actively painting and in 1872 gained some local renown for his early efforts. In 1873 Pearce followed the advice of William Morris Hunt and went to Paris, where he spent three years studying in the private atelier of Leon Bonnat.<BR><BR>In Europe Pearce quickly established his reputation and became one of the most highly regarded American artists of the late 19th century. In the early 1880s he began to spend considerable time painting in the small village of Auvers-sur-Oise in Picardy and settled there permanently in 1885. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon and received many distinguished honors including the French Legion of Honor. Pearce maintained close ties with the United States and served as chairman of the Parisian jury for the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. In the 1890s Pearce executed a mural decoration for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. <BR><BR>Together with Daniel Ridgeway Knight, Charles Sprague Pearce was regarded during the 1880s and 1890s as the finest and most poetic American painters of French peasant subjects. In 1888 George Sheldon remarked that Pearce and Knight 'each has made a study of the Brittany peasant-woman in her relations to the landscape that environs her, each has sought the essential and found it, and each has remained steadfast to the truth without degrading himself with the trivialities of prose' (<I>Recent Ideals of American Art,</B></I> D. Appleton and Company, New York and London, 1888, p. 23). <B>Condition Report:</B> overall good condition, minor strengthing to face and palm<BR><BR><b>Shipping:</b> Requires 3rd Party Shipping (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.heritageauctions.com/common/shipping.php">view shipping information</a>)
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