Painting by Waldo Pierce, Flowers, dated 1949
Initialed and dated in lower right

Frame: 29 1/4" x 37"
Painting: 21 3/4" x 29 1/2"

Waldo Pierce
(Source: Wiki)Waldo Peirce (December 17, 1884 - March 8, 1970) was an American painter, who for many years reveled in living the life of a bohemian expatriate.

Peirce was both a prominent painter and a well-known colorful figure in the world of the arts. In a modern account, he was described as Rabelaisian, bawdy, witty, robust, wild, lusty, protean, lecherous, and luscious. He was sometimes called the American Renoir. Peirce once said he never worked a day in his life. He did, however, spend many hours every day for 50 years of his life painting still lifes, figures, and landscapes as well as hundreds of pictures of his beloved families (he was married four times and had numerous children). With a mustache and full beard and a large cigar jammed perpetually into his mouth he looked every inch of a cartoonist's notion of an artist. Peirce himself was adamant about one thing: I'm a painter, he insisted, not an artist.

Waldo Peirce was born December 17, 1884, in Bangor, Maine, to Mellen Chamberlain Peirce and Anna Hayford. His father was a Bangor lumber baron. Peirce had three siblings, an older brother and a younger sister and brother. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1903. He then attended Harvard University and, by his own account, barely graduated due to copious amounts of time spent in the local pool hall and other trivial pursuits. Although Peirce always identified with the Class of 1907, the exact year of his graduation is not clear, and he may have received his diploma in either 1908 or 1909. Peirce was a large man for his time, and he was drafted onto the Harvard football team, solely, he said, because of his size. He played the center position. After Harvard, Peirce studied art at the Art Students League in New York City, and later, traveled to Europe where he studied at both the Academie Julian in Paris and with the Spanish artist Ignacio Zuloaga. He initially focused on Impressionism.

In 1915, two years before the entry of the United States into World War I, he joined the American Field Service, an ambulance corps that served on the French battlefields. He was later decorated with the Croix de Guerre by the French government for bravery at Verdun.[4] For 10 years, between 1910 and 1920, Peirce lived the expatiate life in France and Paris, before returning to the United States for a couple of years. He then returned to Europe for several more years, and only returned to the U.S. permanently with the advent of World War II.

Portrait painting of Peirce by George Bellows, 1920, on display at the de Young Museum in San FranciscoIn 1938, he was commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts to paint two murals, Legends of the Hudson and Rip van Winkle, for the U.S. Post Office in Troy, New York.

In 1960 Lehigh University exhibited his paintings along with ceramics by Raymond Gallucci and paintings by Charles Ward in an exhibition curated by Francis Quirk.

Good condition overall