Lot 47
  • 47

Charles Courtney Curran

Estimate
100,000 - 150,000 USD
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Description

  • Charles Courtney Curran
  • Summer
  • signed CHAS. C. CURRAN and dated 1906 (lower left)
  • oil on canvas
  • 24 by 36 1/4 in.
  • 60.9 by 92.0 cm

Provenance

Associated Galleries, Ltd., New York
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1943) 
By descent through the family (and sold: Christie's, New York, November 30, 1999, lot 68, illustrated) 
Acquired at the above sale

Condition

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is clean. The canvas is lined using Beva-371 as an adhesive. The lining is required because of an L-shaped break in the canvas in the sky to the right of the dress of the standing figure on the left. There are no other retouches except for one other spot in the sky on the left. Despite the break, the condition of the painting is good overall.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Catalogue Note

In 1903, Kentucky-born Charles Courtney Curran escaped the heat of New York City to summer in the bucolic artist’s colony of Cragsmoor in the Catskills, the likely setting of the present work.  For the remainder of his career, the scenic locale, with its sweeping views of the Rondout and Hudson Valleys, inspired his compositions of women and girls posed in sunlight on hillsides or bluffs against blue skies.  Like his fellow American Impressionist Frank Benson, Curran painted with a bright and vibrant palette that captured the strong, clear sunlight of the summer season — heightened by brushy, expressive applications of paint that captured gentle breezes through tall, green grasses and abundant wildflowers (William Gerdts, American Impressionism, 2nd ed., New York and London, 2001, p. 230; Carl Lowrey, A Legacy of Art: paintings and sculptures by Artist Life Members of the National Arts Club, New York, 2007, p. 81).  At the same time, Curran maintained an Academic modeling of the female body, pointing toward his early studies in the 1880s at the Cincinnati School of Design, New York’s Art Students League, and two years spent at the Académie Julien; with teachers like William Bouguereau, the Paris institution helped launch the careers of a generation of European artists as well as Curran’s fellow Americans Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Robert Henri, and Grant Wood.  During his time in Paris, Curran focused on painting small, plein air compositions of smartly dressed women enjoying modern, daily life in urban parks.  Over a decade later, his American works like Summer are seemingly removed from a specific era or place.  Such timelessness led a contemporary critic to applaud the artist for his “rare faculty of painting for the sake of simple artistic pleasure in the expression of his subject quite without reference to that demand upon memory…  [He] controls and marks his painting with the needed sentiment of peace and relish in man and nature” (“Charles Courtney Curran,” The Critic, ed. Joseph Bensongilder, v. 48, January-June, 1906, p. 39).  Indeed, Summer combines the artist’s specific love of the months spent at Cragsmoor and a universal appreciation of the season.  In so doing, Curran “enacts the doctrine that the truest appeal of oil and canvas should be almost as abstract as that of musical sounds…. [A] sense of true, unqualified emotion through an effect of an impression gained by an instant-long vivid glance at a well-known region” (“Charles Courtney Curran," p. 29).