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37

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE (1820-1910) Se...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:40,000.00 - 60,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE (1820-1910) Se...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
THOMAS WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE
(1820-1910)
Seascape
signed "W. Whittredge" (lower left)
oil on canvas
14 1/2 x 20 in. (36.8 x 50.8 cm)
painted circa 1883 <p>Estimate: $40,000-60,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection Ira Spanierman, Inc., New York, 1966 Kennedy Galleries, New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1980 <p> Exhibited
Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Art Center; Omaha, Joslyn Museum of Art, Nineteeth-Century American Landscape Painting: Selections from the Thyssen-Bornemsza Collection, October 29, 1982-June 19, 1983, no. 46 (illustrated) <p> Literature
Anthony F. Janson, The Paintings of Worthington Whittredge, dissertation Harvard University, 1975, catalogue no. 5-2 Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, New York, 1986, p. 164, no. 46 (illustrated, p. 165) Anthony F. Janson, Worthington Whittredge, Cambridge, New York, Portchester, Melbourne and Sydney, 1989, p. 180 (illustrated, fig. 142, p. 183) Elizabeth Storm Nagy, Europa e America Dipiniti e acquerelli dell'Ottocento e del Novecento dalla Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Milan, 1993, p. 71, no. 50 (illustrated) <p> Worthington Whittredge was one of the more progressive leaders of American art in the late nineteenth century. As President of the National Academy of Design, he saw it as his responsibility to encourage younger artists and fresh ideas, and openly admired artists as various as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, John LaFarge, and James M. Whistler. Whittredge himself repeatedly sought to incorporate these new ideas in his own paintings, and consciously chose subject matter that would provide him with opportunities to do so. When he decided to take his painting in fresh directions in the early 1880s, Whittredge returned to the shores and seas of New England, which he had begun to paint a decade earlier. His favorite locations in this regard were Newport, Rhode Island and Gloucester and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. <p>In such works as Second Beach, Newport, 1880-1881 (Private Collection), Off Seconnet Point, Rhode Island, early 1880s (Manoogian Collection) and Misty Morning at Cape Ann, circa 1883 (location unknown), Whittredge displays a more vigorous brushwork and a plein air spontaneity that Anthony Janson identifies with the "Barbizon naturalism" of Charles-Francois Daubigny. <p>Seascape, which was probably painted at Cape Ann, represents an even greater departure from Hudson River and Luminist representational conventions. Whittredge divides up the scene into three distinct zones - a barely-inflected sandy foreground; a dramatic wave rolling into shore from the open sea; and, again barely inflected, a cloud-filled sky. The differences in the handling of the painting's three divisions serve not only to tilt the perspective upwards, but also to focus the viewer's attention on the long languorous line of the breaking wave. The palette is unusual in its blending of tans and grays with silvery blues and greens. The painting's degree of abstraction and delicacy of color clearly reflect Whittredge's experimental temperament as well as his love of the "new and original." <p>We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot.
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