Estimate: $60,000 - $100,000
American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists
Auction: December 6, 2015 2:00:00 PM EDT
Signed with initials 'N R' lower right; also inscribed 'SPRING' upper center and dated '1950' bottom center, pencil on paper
20 x 19 1/4 in. (50.8 x 48.9cm)
Provenance: The Collection of Charles T. & Cornelia Chapin, Vermont.
By descent in the family.
Private Collection, Virginia.
LITERATURE:
Laurie Norton Moffatt, Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue, Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Norman Rockwell Museum, 1986, p. 309, no. A121b.
NOTE:
Freeman's is pleased to offer the following four pencil illustrations by Norman Rockwell, arguably the most iconic and best known illustrator of the American Scene. An artist whose paintings and drawings were much beloved, he has been heralded for his uncanny ability to depict common people in everyday situations, creating easily understood, witty, and heartwarming works whose broad appeal became immediately associated with a simpler, bygone America. He is perhaps best remembered for his redoubtable association with the revered magazine of his day- The Saturday Evening Post- for which he painted an almost unfathomable (by present standards) 321 cover illustrations. A prolific creator for over five decades, Rockwell was also a calendar illustrator, an illustrator for Life Magazine, and was commissioned to paint a significant number of advertisements for major American companies. His devotion to working in a traditional realist style, carefully choosing and then purposefully posing his subjects to suit his compositions, was wholly antipodal to the avant garde art movements that characterized painting in early-mid 20th century America.
After years of dismissal and exclusion from critics and the art cognoscenti, who categorized Rockwell as a mere calendar artist whose easily recognized oeuvre was overly sentimental and not to be considered "high art", this view of Rockwell has undergone a major critical and financial reappraisal. As evidenced by the number of recent scholarly biographies of the artist, major museum exhibitions, and ever increasing demand for his works among collectors, Rockwell's resurgence in both the primary and secondary markets is both undeniable and exhilarating.
This special collection of four pencil illustrations boasts an impeccable provenance. Originally acquired from a private collection by Charles T. & Cornelia Chapin, these works were left undisturbed in the Chapin's cabin hideaway in Vermont and passed through familial decent to the current owners. Interestingly, the cabin in which they adorned the walls was previously owned by Rockwell himself. The drawings have never before been offered for public sale, and each is a study, albeit fully and meticulously rendered, for oil paintings which appeared in Brown & Bigelow's Four Seasons calendar in 1950.