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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALFRED WORDSWORTH THOMPSON (1840-1896) The Ga...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:25,000.00 - 35,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALFRED WORDSWORTH THOMPSON (1840-1896) The Ga...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
ALFRED WORDSWORTH THOMPSON
(1840-1896)
The Garden at Monte Carlo, 1876-1877
signed "Wordsworth Thompson N.A." and inscribed "Monte Carlo/Monaco" (lower left)
oil on canvas
18 1/2 x 31 1/2 in. (48.7 x 82.2 cm) <p>Estimate: $25,000-35,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1979 <p> Literature
Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, pp. 234, no. 78 (illustrated, p. 235) <p> Born in Baltimore, Thompson initially trained for the law with his father, before opening a painting studio in Baltimore in 1859. He went to Paris in 1861, where he became a student of Charles Gleyre, the Swiss-born resident artist there, and the teacher of many of the future leaders of the Impressionist movement: Pierre Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédréric Bazille, and Claude Monet. Thompson also studied in Paris with the landscape painter, Edward Lambinet, Adolphe Yvon, the Italian orientalist painter, Alberto Pasini in 1864-1865, and horse anatomy with the painter-sculptor Antoine Barye. Thompson exhibited at the Paris Salon only once, in 1865. On his return to the United States in 1868, Thompson took up residence in New York City, becoming an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1873, and a full academican four years later; that same year, 1877, he became a founding member of the Society of American Artists, though he participated with this new exhibition group only in their first two shows in 1878-1879. While maintaining his studio in New York at the Y.M.C.A. building, Thompson moved to Summit, New Jersey in 1884, building a home named "Stonewood."
<p>After returning to this country from his studies, Thompson made frequent trips abroad, preferring the lands bordering the Mediterranean - Spain, North Africa, Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, and Southern France, obvious destinations for an artist in search of respite from the American winter months. Thompson's specialty during his earlier career was figural landscapes, painted both in the exotic locations he favored abroad, and in this country at Lake George, Long Island, the White Mountains, and North Carolina. In 1876, he married Mary Pumpelly, and they appear to have honeymooned on the French Mediterranean coast. In the winter of 1876-1877, he painted The Garden at Monte Carlo; in the spring of 1877, he exhibited The Corniche Road-Monaco to Mentone at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, and that December showed By the Sea at Mentone at the Brooklyn Art Association. Thompson was represented by the present work at the annual exhibition of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts over a decade later, in February of 1888.
<p>The French Mediterranean coast was not a popular destination for American painters in the later nineteenth century, and only a few artists such as Edward Darley Boit, Clinton Ogilvie, and Felix De Crano appear to have painted there, all in the decade of the 1880s. William Stanley Haseltine sketched in and around Mentone and the Corniche Road in October 1867.1 <p>The Garden at Monte Carlo reflects Thompson's traditional strategies of carefully drawn figures, combined with a mastery of deep perspective; the breadth of landscape here is not only a factual representation of the coastline but mirrors the preferences of his teacher, Lambinet. Thompson is careful to record the traditional Tyrolese costume of the nursemaid accompanying her three youthful charges, while the tropical clime is identified in the palm trees at the left, which tower over an elegant, upper-class group of figures surrounding a horse and carriage. Overall, the scene is a very sophisticated one, from the purebred hound in the foreground, the Japanese fan casually lying on the ground, and the elaborate stone balustrades leading down to the sea, surmounted by flowering urns. While the painting provides obvious appeal to new, wealthy collectors in the United States who would be attracted to scenes of wealth and leisure, the sparkling light and color and the extensive breadth of the landscape in The Garden at Monte Carlo surely reflects also Thompson's own happiness and satisfaction in his new marital state. <p>In 1880, Thompson exhibited A May-Day in Fifth Avenue (Haggin Museum, Stockton, California) at the National Academy of Design, which was conspicuously positioned in the exhibition and garnered tremendous acclaim, setting the precedent for the celebration of the modern city that was to become a major theme among the next generation of American artists. Although Thompson himself did not follow up on this subject, it appears to have turned his attention away from exotic subject matter, and to concentrate upon events relating to his native land.2 Thompson's later career began to rest more upon historical recreations of scenes from the times of the American Revolution and the Civil War.3
<p>We are grateful to Dr. William Gerdts for cataloguing this lot. <p> notes 1 Helen Haseltine Plowden, William Henry Haseltine, London, Frederick Muller, 1947, p. 94. Sanford Gifford was indifferent to the studies Haseltine had made in the region when he saw them in Paris in June of 1868. Marc Simpson, Andrea Henderson, Sally Mills, Expression of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine, San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1992, p. 180. 2 It was as if the painter had said, "I will abandon for once my portfolios and historical books, my studies of Mediterranean coast-scenes with donkeys and fashionable women, my researches into ancient history, and will step into the street and take a look at life around me." George W. Sheldon, American Painters, New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1881, pp. 194-195. 3 Edward King, "In the Good Old Colony Times," Monthly Illustrator, May 4, 1895, pp. 131-138. Along with Sheldon op. cit., pp. 193-196, (this essay first appeared in Art Journal, 1880, New York, pp. 305-306), the other most extensive treatment of Thompson is to be found in Samuel Greene Wheeler Benjamin, Our American Artists, Boston, D. Lothrop & Co., 1879. This essay also appeared in Wide Awake, October 9, 1879, pp. 244-247.
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