Collect: American Art Featuring Works from the Estate of Sydney F. Martin

Note

Philadelphia artist Ethel. V. Ashton studied at the School of Design for Women alongside notable contemporaries such as Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary. During their schooling, the three girls took classes at the Graphic Sketch Club and used people they encountered randomly on the streets as models. The real-life actions and diversity of the everyday people in the street, was a marked difference from the academically approved posed models in their classrooms. The work seen here depicts two young Black girls fishing in the Fairmount park area. She would later enroll at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and began to share a studio with Neel and Medary. During the 1930s she began participating in national competitions and juried exhibitions. In 1941, Ashton's design Defenders of the Wyoming Country—1778 was selected for the post office mural in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. Her later works synthesize both abstract and realism. (For more by this artist see lot 89)