Lot 91 : LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY (1848-1933)

Louis Comfort Tiffany - 1848-1933

Auction Location: United States of America - 1992
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Description:

Family Group with Cow signed Louis C. Tiffany, l.r. - - gouache and watercolor on paper laid down on board 20 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. (51.3 x 72.9 cm.) PROVENANCE Estate of the artist Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, his daughter Descended in the family to the present owners EXHIBITED New York, The Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, Louis Comfort Tiffany: The Paintings, Mar.-May 1979, p. 57, no. 37 LITERATURE A. Duncan, Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York, 1992, p. 29, illus. Family Group with Cow was painted circa 1888 at Somesville, a resort area on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, and probably depicts the artist's second wife, Louise, whom he married in 1886, with three children from his first marriage, Charles Lewis II, Hilda, and May-May, holding one of his recently born twins. Since 1871 Tiffany had been a member of the American Watercolor Society, whose efforts had increased visibility and respectability for a medium that, until the 1860s, had been viewed as the province of amateurs. An examination of Tiffany's exhibition records and prices from the twenty year period of his association with the group reveals that the artist viewed his watercolors, despite their direct and spontaneous quality, not as sketches, but as finished paintings equivalent in importance to his oils. The monumental scale of Family Group, whose size and subject are closely related to the oil painted the same summer, My Family at Somesville (Morse Museum of Art), reflects the seriousness of Tiffany's approach to the medium, which was in many respects more suited than oil to capturing his fascination with the changing effects of light. Tiffany shared his interest in plein-air genre subjects with his compatriots Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, but his high-key palette and broken brushwork reflect the influence of the French Impressionists, whose work he undoubtedly saw during his frequent trips to Paris. ERRATA Lot 91: Signed Louis C. Tiffany, lower left, not lower right.