American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

We wish to thank Roberta A. Mayer for her assistance cataloguing the present lot.

Provenance:

Private Collection, Pennsylvania.

Lot Note:

Although most popularly known for his exquisite stained-glass creations, Louis Comfort Tiffany first trained and worked as a painter of landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes in both oil and watercolor. He first studied with landscapist George Inness and then trained with Leon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly in Paris, a specialist in Middle Eastern subjects. This education, combined with an 1869 visit to Spain and North Africa with artist Samuel Colman, stirred an enduring interest in strong color. On this 1869 trip, Colman also encouraged Tiffany to make watercolor sketches for later conversion into paintings. Throughout the 1870s, Tiffany exhibited his paintings widely, and in 1877, became one of the secessionist artists, along with John La Farge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who rebelled against the staid National Academy of Design and formed the Society of American Artists. 

By the late 1870s, Tiffany began to shift his focus to decorative arts, interiors, and glassmaking, but he never fully turned away from painting as a medium for more personal expression. Woman by a Stream dates from his later period and reflects Tiffany's enduring fondness for the media of both painting and decoration, as well as the fusion of the two. The present composition relates to an earlier watercolor by the artist, titled The Bather, c. 1910 (location unknown), which was published as an illustration in the New York Herald in 1910. The Bather was a major work that was widely exhibited and described as “exquisitely colored.” (“Chicago Sees Water Colors,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 18, 1911, p. 19) Signed and dated to 1913, Woman by a Stream appears to be a later version of The Bather and not a preparatory work. It is possible that the present gouache and watercolor was executed as part of the design exploration that culminated with Tiffany’s The Bathers, a large leaded-glass window completed c. 1914 and installed in 1915 in the living hall of the artist’s country estate, Laurelton Hall, in Oyster Bay, New York. This leaded-glass window was unfortunately lost when Laurelton Hall was destroyed by fire in 1957.