LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  AMERICAN ART  / 

35

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection HARRY HERMAN ROSELAND (1866-1950) The Peapic...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:70,000.00 - 90,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection HARRY HERMAN ROSELAND (1866-1950) The Peapic...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
HARRY HERMAN ROSELAND
(1866-1950)
The Peapickers of Long Island, 1888
signed and dated "Roseland 88" (lower right)
oil on canvas
26 x 36 3/8 in. (66 x 92.4 cm)
<p>Estimate: $70,000-90,000 <p> Provenance
David S. Ramus, Ltd., Atlanta, Georgia Sotheby's, New York, December 3, 1987, lot 108 Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1987 <p> Exhibited
New York, Brooklyn Art Club, Autumn 1887 (Gold Medal) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, February 1888, (exhibited as In the Pea Field)
<p> Harry Roseland was born, lived, and died in Brooklyn, New York, never traveling abroad. As such , he was one of the painters most involved with the Brooklyn artistic community, though his continued devotion to traditional strategies increasingly isolated him from more modern developments in the metropolitan region. Originally maintaining a studio at 203 Montague Street through the 1880s, then at 191 Clinton Street for over a decade, Roseland was in the Ovington Building on Fulton Street for over twenty-eight years, conveniently near the Brooklyn Bridge terminal and the ferry, which gave him easy access to other areas of Brooklyn. Roseland shared a studio loft with William S. Barrett, Gustave Wiegand, George McCord, and Paul Dogherty. In the spring of 1903, Roseland, along with his studio companion and five other local artists organized, "The Brooklyn Ten," surely inspired by the success of the five-year old "Ten American Painters." The group held their first exhibition at the Hooper Gallery on Fulton Street.1 <p>Roseland, one of the members of the Students Guild, studied with Thomas Eakins, who had been engaged in the fall of 1881 to teach at the free school of the Brooklyn Art Association, where he remained for several years, probably through the 1884-1885 session. Roseland was also a student of J. Carroll Beckwith, who also taught at the Guild. In 1884, Roseland began exhibiting his work at both the Brooklyn Art Association and the National Academy of Design in New York, first with rural landscapes, but soon establishing himself as a conservative painter of story-telling figural scenes, often set in the out-of-doors. In the late nineteenth century, "story-telling" was the adjective that was regularly applied by critics to define Roseland's art, and this, in turn, dissociated him from the practitioners of "art for art's sake" as well as those who began to practice less mimetic forms. <p>Roseland's early canvases had a considerable range, from single images of elegantly garbed young women to elderly folk, both male and female. But his larger canvases concentrated on working agricultural scenes such as The Oysterman, (location unknown), but more often on groups on workers, especially women in the fields, such as his Onion Weeders (location unknown), Cranberry Pickers of 1888 (formerly, Chapellier Galleries, New York), Hoeing Potatoes (location unknown), and Toilers of the Field (The Brooklyn Museum). These scenes reflect farming activities in the more rural areas of Brooklyn or Long Island. Several depictions of crabbing in Jamaica Bay are recorded, and one writer noted that: "Mr. Harry Roseland has spent an enjoyable and profitable season within a few miles of Brooklyn, for he found on the farms and gardens of Long Island, material that suits him better than Normandy meadows, and people that are just as quaint and interesting as the blue peasants in France."2 <p>Peapickers of Long Island is the most elaborate of these paintings to come to light, and won a gold medal at the autumn exhibition of the Brooklyn Art Club in 1887. It was sold the opening night, and afterwards reproduced as an etching.3 While the genesis of this motif may hark back to Jean-François Millet's The Gleaners (Louvre, Paris), the casual stance and social interaction of these working women suggest less demeaning and burdensome toil, and bring to mind some of the more informal canvases of the second generation of French peasant specialists such as Jules Breton, and even more, Eastman Johnson's recent masterwork, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880 (Timken Museum of Art, San Diego), which Roseland might possibly have seen as a teenager when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design. Critics in fact distinguished between Roseland's agricultural working women and their European counterparts, noting that: "In Europe, it is a common enough sight in all agricultural districts; and sometimes they are called upon for distressingly hard labor which should be performed by the men....Our American women go a-haying now and then, mainly for the fun of it."4 Roseland's bright blue sky, clean costumes and aprons, and orderly fields also suggest wholesome, fresh-air activity as a corollary to rural labor, enhanced by the view of a sandy Long Island beach and the white sails of boats in the waters beyond.
<p>Roseland continued to devote his brush to pictures of outdoor agricultural labor at least through 1898, when he painted Harvest Time (unlocated; sold Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, January 30 and 31, 1985). It may have been his turn to Southern labor in Cotton Picking in the Old South (unlocated; sold Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, January 3-February 2, 1980) which led him to undertake pictures of African-American life and customs for which he remains best known today. These fall into two general themes: figures of both juvenile and adult African-Americans at rest, and especially pictures of African-American fortune-tellers offering their guidance to elegantly garbed white female clientele. Even late in Roseland's career, however, Brooklyn continued to retain its attraction for him, as he painted scenes of vast crowds, literally, hundreds of bathers at Coney Island. <p>We are grateful to Dr. William Gerdts for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 "Art Notes of the Week," New York Herald, April 26, 1903, section 5, p. 11. 2 "American notes," Studio, 7, October, 22, 1892, p. 383. 3 H.T. Clarke, "Harry Roseland," Truth, 18, May, 1889. p. 116. 4 Jno. Gilmer Speed, "Story-Telling as a Motive in Painting," Monthly Illustrator, 3, January-March 1985, pp. 241-242.
Sign In to Bookmark Lot