Ralph Albert Blakelock
Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue
Auction Closed
January 24, 06:07 PM GMT
Estimate
12,000 - 18,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Ralph Albert Blakelock
1847 - 1919
Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue
signed R.A. Blakelock (lower left)
oil on canvas
16 ¼ by 24 ¼ in.
41.3 by 61.6 cm.
Executed circa 1870.
This painting is included in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Nebraska Blakelock Inventory as NBI-973, category II.
Coe Kerr Gallery, New York
D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., New York
Questroyal Gallery, LLC, New York (acquired by 2005)
Acquired from the above in 2009 by the present owner
New York, Coe Kerr Gallery and New York, Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Ralph Albert Blakelock, October 1998
New York, Questroyal Gallery, LLC, The Great Mad Genius, November - December 2005
"To about [1868-1873] probably belong several paintings of the outskirts of New York, especially the squatters' shanties around 57th Street and Central Park. What is now the city's center of fashion was then a waste of mud and goats and patched-up huts. These pictures, on the surface so different from his landscapes, were actually not inconsistent with them. They conveyed much the same sense of desolation, this time man-made. They were romantic, not in the usual sense of escape, but of fascination with the picturesque squalor of this extreme of city life. Few of our painters had so far had the courage to paint the American city, particularly in such unconventional aspects, and these works showed a genuine originality. In contrast to the dream world of his later art, they had a realistic force that makes one wish he had preserved this close contact with the reality around him." (Lloyd Goodrich, Ralph Albert Blakelock Centenary Exhibition, New York, 1947, p. 11)
