Lot Note:

Mary Elizabeth Price builds Still Life with Lilies and Foxgloves on a ground of silver leaf and allows the metal do the work that depth and atmosphere would do in a conventional still life. Lilies in ochre and olive-gold and foxglove spikes hung with bells of madder and plum rise from a dense thicket of strap-like leaves. Each form is fixed by a firm, dark contour and filled with thinly worked color. The blossoms are pressed against the picture plane and layered like the motifs of a textile or a screen, while the pale metal shows through between and beneath them, its sheen softened and broken by age. At the margins, a wash of lilac gives way to the cooler field behind. The garden is seen as pattern, with the vertical thrust of the foxgloves answered by the looping arcs of the foliage below.

Price belonged to a generation of Philadelphia painters who absorbed Japanese decorative arts and the Arts and Crafts movement alongside Impressionism, and as a member of the Philadelphia Ten, the group of women artists who exhibited together as a collective and favored a more progressive, decorative idiom than the city's academic establishment, she pursued those interests with refreshing independence. Her use of silver leaf is the most individual part of her work. Here, the technique serves native garden flowers rather than exotic motifs. The contour drawing owes something to Japanese woodblock and screen traditions, and the oil is kept thin, in scumbled veils and economical strokes, so that the silver is never fully covered. The restrained palette of old gold, olive, wine, and mauve gives the panel its tension, and the drawing is confident enough to suggest the whole plant with a few lines. The picture is a distinctive example of the artist's work in metal leaf and a document of the decorative current in early twentieth-century American painting.

Framed: 35 1/4 x 29 1/4 x 1 1/2 in.

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