Signed lower right and titled 'Mexico' with a date of '52. The canvas size of this work measures 20 x 26 inches, frame measures 29 x 35 inches. Two F.A.R. Gallery labels verso. One of these is on a stretcher. The other is on the frame itself and reads F.A.R Gallery 746 Madison Avenue New York 21 N.Y. No sales records can be found for any works of this complexity by this undiscovered 20th century female American artist. Several of her paintings were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Telfair Museum of Art has an oil on canvas titled Cafe Fortune Teller, 1933 on display. In 1933 Mary Hoover was living in Spain and was close friends with English artist Edward Burra. He too had just arrived in Spain and executed a number of works there just before the chaos of the Spanish Civil War. Burra was fascinated with Tarot Card readings and himself consulted with fortune tellers. He had painted a work titled 'Fortune Tellers' around that same time. He and Hoover left Spain shortly after that but remained close friends. Mary Hoover Aiken later married Pulitzer prize winning poet Conrad Aiken and for a time, she and Conrad Aiken and Edward Burra shared a home in Charlestown, near Boston. " Ed Burra painted in the dining- room, Mary in the bedroom upstairs and Conrad wrote in the cellar." According to Joseph Killorin's essay on AskArt.com, at age 15, Mary Hoover had chosen, "to skip high school to study painting at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, going on to the famous Provincetown school to study with Charles Hawthorne and Edwin Dickinson and then to George Luks in New York. After scholarships to Fontainebleau and the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Munich, she was chosen by Luis Quintinilla to paint with him the large frescoes in the Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid." This painting was recently discovered in a Chicago estate.

Puncture on lower right visible from the back.