Details & Cataloguing
American Art
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New York
New York
Albert Bierstadt
1830 - 1902
BUTTERFLY
signed ABierstadt (lower right)
oil and pencil on paper
5 by 7 1/2 inches
(12.7 by 19.1 cm)
Executed circa 1890.
Read Condition Report
Read Condition Report
oil and pencil on paper
5 by 7 1/2 inches
(12.7 by 19.1 cm)
Executed circa 1890.
We thank Melissa Webster Speidel, President of the Bierstadt Foundation and Director of the Albert Bierstadt catalogue raisonné project, for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.
Catalogue Note
Albert Biertstadt created small butterfly compositions like the present work as gifts for visitors to his studio: “This is how he made them. We all clustered about the table and he took out a palette, a knife and some large slips of cartridge paper. Two or three daubs of pigment on the paper, a quick fold, and holding it still folded against a pane of glass, he made two or three strokes of that wizard-like palette knife on the outside, and hey, presto! a wonderful Brazilian butterfly or moth, even the veining on the wings complete! A pencil touch added the antennae, that artist's autograph was added to the corner, and now we each of us own a painting by Bierstadt” (as quoted in Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West, 1974, p. 302-03).
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