Collection of a Southern Gentleman

Seymour Joseph Guy (American, 1824-1910)
The Piano Lesson,” c. 1884
oil on board
16 1/8 x 12 inches

$8,000 – 12,000

The English-born and trained artist Seymour Joseph Guy established a reputation in the mid-nineteenth century as one of America’s finest genre painters of child-life. His primarily cabinet-sized pictures were esteemed by his fellow artists and leading collectors of American Art, and he was widely respected for his technical ability and knowledge of the science of painting.

Guy immigrated from London to New York in 1854. He became a close friend and colleague of his fellow English expatriate John George Brown (1831-1913). In the early 1860s the artists both took spaces at the Tenth Street Studio Building in Manhattan, which had opened in 1857. Guy would occupy a studio there for forty-seven years while residing at different residences further uptown in the vicinity of East 120th street. He first established his career in America as a portraitist but turned to genre painting of children in around 1861 – taking his cue from Brown, who started to picture children in rustic settings in 1859. The majority of Guy’s genre scenes of the period of the early 1860s feature children playing in a country setting in summertime.

At the end of the 1860s, Guy developed a greater interest in creating interior genre scenes. This may have arisen as a result of his painting The Contest for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in their New York Dining Room (1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which features the elegantly appointed dining room of the Gordon’s home on West 33rd Street in Manhattan. This was Guy’s first major attempt to combine portraiture and genre painting in the same composition – a direction he would continue to follow for the rest of his career.

In 1873, Guy received the most important commission of his career, a portrait of William Henry Vanderbilt and his family posed in the drawing room of their home at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street. Going to the Opera (Biltmore Estate) features Vanderbilt and his wife surrounded by their thirteen children, who are about to step out for a night at the opera. Following the exhibition of the painting at the 1874 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, Guy would devote most of his attention and artistic acumen to creating small jewel-like domestic genre scenes. In the 1880s he also returned to painting portraits on a regular basis.

The Piano Lesson dates from about 1884. The two figures in the composition are closely related to the pair of mother and daughter that appear in See-Saw Margery Daw (1884, Location Unknown – reproduced in American Paintings from the Landon Collection [Charlotte, North Carolina: Mint Museum, 1979], p. 51). which also explores the subject of motherly affection. The models for the figures are not known, but it is likely that the young girl is one of the artist’s nine children – who formed a veritable storehouse of potential models for his brush. As in many of Guy’s works, a beautifully designed and well-crafted piece of furniture (here a piano) appears in the right foreground, and leads the viewer’s eye into the composition while forming a fascinating structure in its own right.

Stylistically, The Piano Lesson reflects Guy’s penchant for minute workmanship and careful finish. His style is precise and almost photographic, and he labors lovingly on details, especially the polished wooden surface of the piano. As is typical of Guy’s genre paintings, the surface is marked by a smooth, glossy, enamel-like finish. Colors are carefully blended and fused, and brush marks are invisible to the eye. The white and beige colored attire of the mother and child, and the salmon colored garment laying beside the sheet music atop the piano, add bright touches of color and help illuminate the mostly dark-toned composition. Above all Guy was concerned with the careful and meticulous rendering of tonal values. This remained true throughout his career, even on those rare ocassions when he employed a bolder and more varied palette. As a writer for the Brooklyn Eagle astutely commented in 1885, Guy could “analyze a composition, scale its merits and defects and reveal its hidden curves and lines as accurately as the chemist analyzes a drug.”

Keno Auctions wishes to thank Dr. Bruce Weber, the authority on the work of Seymour Joseph Guy and former Senior Curator at the National Academy Museum, for his assistance with this lot.

This painting is in an excellent state of preservation. It was cleaned by expert painting conservators, Yost Conservation, LLC. Their full report is available upon request. Tom Yost has kindly offered to explain his condition report with anyone who wishes to call to request more information (203) 525-0429.
This work on panel is in lovely condition. The work is cleaned, varnished and retouched. There are no abrasions and the only retouches that exist have been applied around the extreme edges to a few isolated spots of frame abrasion. Under ultraviolet light, the original paint layer reads very strongly in some areas and it is certainly tempting to confuse some of this dark original pigment with retouching. However, as stated above the only retouches are around the extreme edges. (Condition report kindly provided by Simon Parkes, 09/23/14).