PROVENANCE:
Lachaise Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts, 1992;
[With]Salander-O'Reilley, New York, 1993-98;
Private collection, New York, acquired from the above, 1998;
Private collection, Oyster Bay, New York, by descent from the above.

LITERATURE:
D. B. Goodall, "Gaston Lachaise, Sculptor," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, vol. 2, p. 449 (plaster model for Bust of Woman [Garden Figure]);
Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991, pp. 77, 84, no. 34 (another example illustrated);
Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Gaston Lachaise: Sculptures, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1992, pp. 24, 60, no. 24 (another example illustrated);
S. Hunter, Lachaise, New York, 1993, pp. 206-08, 245 (another example illustrated);
Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, Ten Years of Collecting: The Permanent Collection in Context, exhibition catalogue, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, 1999, pp. 20, 29 (another example illustrated);

We are grateful to the art historian Virginia Budny for her gracious assistance in cataloguing this lot.

According to Virginia Budny, Gaston Lachaise's Bust of Woman (Garden Figure) (Lachaise Foundation no. 175B) was derived from a monumental garden sculpture of a standing nude woman commissioned from him by Nelson A. Rockefeller in April 1935. Lachaise's full-size model for Rockefeller's statue (LF 175) was completed and cast in cement during the next five weeks; the statue is now owned by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. (Four other examples of the statue were also produced in cement, three of which are owned by the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.) The statue, which evokes a mood of serenity and abundance, was directly inspired by Isabel Nagle (1872-1957), Lachaise's beloved wife and muse. In June -- nine months before Lachaise's unexpected death -- Rockefeller commissioned a bronze cast of the statue's head. This bronze (LF 175A), completed by the following September, is unlocated. It had been made from part of a two-piece plaster of the head and upper torso of Woman (Garden Figure) (LF 175B). During the same period, Lachaise reworked a plaster cast of Woman (Garden Figure) (LF 175) to create a second, unidealized version of the statue; this version (LF 137) was first issued in bronze in about 1973 for the Lachaise Foundation, which oversees the sculptor's estate.

In 1991, the Foundation authorized the first of a projected edition of twelve bronze casts to be made from Lachaise's two-piece plaster of the head and upper torso of Woman (Garden Figure) (LF 175B). The second bronze in this series, the present example, was cast in the following year. The third bronze -- the last in the edition to have been produced thus far -- is owned by the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Lachaise's plaster model of Bust of Woman (Garden Figure) belongs to the Lachaise Foundation.

This particular lot is accompanied by a white wooden pedestal measuring 43.5 x 32 x 17 inches.


Alternate Artist Spellings: "Lachaise, Gaston"

Minor surface dust; tiny abrasion on the back of woman's head and on her left breast; scratch on the right corner of the base; rubbing to the high point of the woman's right thumb. 

Dimensions excluding the bronze base are 26 1/2 x 26 x 13 inches.

Dimensions including the bronze base are 28 1/2 x 30 x 15 inches.