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American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists
|
- Sale 6384
Live
| Philadelphia
Dec 7 | 1:00 PM EST
Live
| Philadelphia
Sale 6384
| Philadelphia
| Philadelphia
Estimate$30,000 – $50,000
This lot is accompanied by a letter dated March 16th, 2021 from Marie Louise Kane, the foremost authority on the work of Richard Edward Miller and author of the monograph, A Bright Oasis: The Paintings of Richard E. Miller. We wish to thank Marie Louise Kane for her kind assistance in cataloging this lot.
Provenance:
Private Collection, Paris, France.
Acquired directly from the above, c. 1981.
Private Collection, New Windsor, New York.
Mid-Hudson Galleries, Salisbury Mills, New York, Sale of November 14, 2020, Lot 73.
Acquired directly from the above sale.
Private Collection, Washington, DC.
Lot Note: Rendered in warm hues and heightened with areas of broken brushwork, the present painting is a wonderfully rendered composition that is pleasing to the eye and exemplary of a familiar Miller subject–a beautiful and fashionably dressed young woman seated before her dressing table and facing left to right in profile with sunlight streaming through a window behind her. The famed American Impressionist's canvases engage and draw in the viewer, and were, according to Miller himself, "not for the staid environment of museums, but for the comfortable intimacy of people's homes." Such paintings were meant to be "...decorative, the conveying of a pleasant optical sensation." There are many related paintings by Miller in which a well-dressed young woman either sits before a mirror, or as in the present work, holds a mirror. The viewer's eye is drawn to the young woman's face, then down to the mirror she delicately holds at an angle in her left hand, then over to her right hand drawn upwards across her chest and over her necklace, resulting in a sort of compositional counterbalancing which adds to the work's visual appeal.
Framed: 35 5/8 x 29 1/8 in.
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Adam Veil
VP, Head of Department, American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists
