Edward Henry Potthast

Private collection, 1915 (acquired from the artist)
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1981

Traverse City, Michigan, The Dennos Museum Center; East Lansing, Michigan, Kresge Art Museum; Grand Rapids, Michigan, Grand Rapids Art Museum; Battle Creek, Michigan, Art Center of Battle Creek; Kalamazoo, Michigan, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Midland, Michigan, Arts Midland: Galleries & School of the Midland Center for the Arts; Marquette, Michigan, Northern Michigan University Art Museum; Port Huron, Michigan, Port Huron Museum, Little Gems of American Painting from the Manoogian Collection, June 1996-January 1998

The panel is slightly bowed. There is scattered surface cracking and a few possible pindots of surface accretion. Under UV: there are a few lines of inpainting at upper corners to address frame abrasion, a thin 1/2 inch line at lower left corner and a thin 1/2 inch horizontal line near center right edge.Some pigments fluoresce unevenly but appear to be original.
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Edward Potthast spent many summers traveling along the New England coastline, visiting the beaches of Monhegan Island and Ogunquit in Maine, as well as Gloucester and Rockport in Massachusetts. When it wasn't possible to travel far from his home in New York City, Potthast would take his materials to study the local crowds at Coney Island and Far Rockaway. William H. Gerdts writes, "He is best known today for his scenes of beaches in New York, where he moved in 1896. These may be later pictures though they tend to be undated. Potthast maintained an Impressionist commitment from his days at Grez, but his adoption of carefree bathers as subjects may have developed in the 1910s. (The catalogue of Potthast's one-man show at the J.W.S. Young Gallery in Chicago in March 1920 noted that the artist had begun to exhibit a series of beach scenes only recently). These paintings are often of children playing on the sand or in the water, rendered in generalized form and painted with emphasis on flat patterns of beach umbrellas, balloons, and bathing caps. Painted in both thickly impastoed oils and free-flowing washes, they seem inspired, at least in part, by the work of the Spanish artist linked to Impressionism, Joaquín Sorolla, while also recalling similar subjects by William Glackens and, particularly, by Maurice Prendergast" (American Impressionism, New York, 1984, p. 244).