Housed in a Frederick Harer frame.

Provenance:

The Artist.

Grand Central Galleries, New York.

Private Collection, Chicago (possibly Edward Burgess Butler), acquired from the above, July 1923.

The Estate of Edward Burgess Butler, Chicago.

Sotheby’s, New York, sale of May 18, 2005, Lot 58.

Acquired from the above sale.

Jim’s of Lambertville, Lambertville, New Jersey,

Acquired from the above, 2005.

Exhibited:

Philadelphia, Art Club of Philadelphia, Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Daniel Garber, Robert Henri, Frederick J. Waugh, November 18 – December 10, 1922, no. 39.

New York, Macbeth Gallery, Recent Landscapes by Daniel Garber, N.A., January 2 – 22, 1923, no. 6.

Doylestown, James A. Michener Art Museum, The Painterly Voice of Bucks County's Fertile Ground, October 22 - April 1, 2012.

Literature:

James M. Alterman, New Hope for American Art, Lambertville, 2005, p. 169, illustrated.

Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, vol. I, pp. 116-117; 166, illustrated, and vol. II, p. 163, no. P449, illustrated.

Lot Note:

In the best of Garber's work, the landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania is less a place than a luminous condition. In the present lot, he brings that condition indoors. In the Studio is dominated by a vast gridded window, its mullions laid across the canvas like a loose trellis, through which a wall of summer foliage presses toward the viewer in short, flickering strokes of viridian, sap green and lemon. Garber lets the warm buff of the ground breathe through this broken touch, so the whole surface shimmers with a dry, pastel-like vibration. The leaves seem to tremble in the heat. The effect is closer to the optical vibrancy of Post-Impressionist color than to the tempered Impressionism for which Garber is usually praised, and it is a reminder of how freely he could handle paint when the subject released him from the demands of a finished exhibition landscape.

Against this green incandescence, Garber arranges a quiet drama of attention. At left, two women lean toward one another over a table, absorbed in some small task, while a potted plant and a leaning panel anchor the corner. At right, a seated figure bends toward a drawing board and a standing figure in a pale smock faces an easel streaked with violet and vermilion, her back turned entirely to us. The picture gives us the studio as a place of work and concentration, and the figures are built from the same dry, directional strokes as the foliage, so that room and garden dissolve into one another. A bouquet of wildflowers in a blue vase supplies the composition's sharpest chromatic accent, and the ochre and rust of the carpet in the foreground grounds the cool architecture of light above it. It is an interior that is also, quite deliberately, a landscape, and a rare and ambitious meeting of the two genres in Garber's oeuvre.

The picture's early history reflects the esteem in which it was held. Shown at the Art Club of Philadelphia in the winter of 1922 alongside Robert Henri and Frederick Judd Waugh, and again at Macbeth Gallery in January 1923, it passed through Grand Central Galleries that July to a Chicago collection, possibly that of Edward Burgess Butler, in whose estate it remained until it first appeared at auction in 2005. Its inclusion in the James A. Michener Art Museum's 2012 exhibition on Bucks County painting confirmed its place within the region's canon. Presented in a handsome Harer frame, In the Studio is an unusually fresh and tactile work, accompanied by a distinguished record of exhibition and ownership.

Framed: 27 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 2 in.

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