Robert Henri

By descent in the family of the sitter

This work is in good condition. The canvas is wax lined. There are a few small surface accretions in the background. Under UV: the work is difficult to read due to an opaque varnish. There are some scattered pindots of inpainting in the background.
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By 1925, when Robert Henri painted the sitter, Carll Tucker Jr., he was widely recognized as a pre-eminent portrait painter in the United States. In the present work, young Carll sits relaxed with one knee propped up, looking boyishly innocent against an all-black background. His ornate blue and black jacket with yellow embellishment reveals the nuanced color combinations Henri was beginning to explore in his later decades as a portrait painter.

In his portraits, it was important for Henri to establish a relationship with his sitters in an effort to empathize with their point of view. Henri once spoke about this in depth: “The people I like to paint are ‘my people,’ whoever they may be, wherever they may exist, the people through whom dignity of life is manifest, that is, who are in some way expressing themselves naturally along the lines nature intended for them. My people may be old or young, rich or poor…but wherever I find them, the Indian at work in the white man’s way, the Spanish gypsy moving back to the freedom of the hills, the little boy, quiet and reticent before the stranger, my interest is awakened and my impulse immediately is to tell about them through my own language – drawing and painting in color” (Valerie Leeds, My People: The Portraits of Robert Henri, Seattle and London, 1994, p. 16).

Carll Tucker Jr. would grow up to have a career in publishing, owning a collection of smaller newspapers in the New York area before going on to form the Patent Trader which covered news in Westchester County communities.