MARLBOROUGH, Mass. – Skinner Auctioneers will conduct a live auction of American Art on Wednesday, May 25, starting at 10 am Eastern time at Skinner’s Marlborough gallery. Ranging across centuries from the early Hudson River School to early American Modernism, the sale features masterworks by some of this country’s greatest painters and sculptors. Absentee and Internet live bidding will be available through LiveAuctioneers.
The auction is notable for its collection of American landscapes, which are as diverse in style and provenance as the country’s own terrain. A fantastic example of Western grandeur is presented in Edgar Alwin Payne’s Topmost Trail, which carries an estimate of $70,000-$90,000. Depicting a pack rider roaming across the Eastern Sierra, on the remote side of California’s Sierra Nevada range, this work captures a sweeping view of one of the artist’s favorite regions. Payne, who sojourned deep into California’s most remote areas to capture the solitude and majesty of the American West, rarely included signs of human life in his portrayal of the Sierras; in this notable exception, the horses and rider accentuate the overpowering magnitude of the mountain face that dominates the background.
Edgar Alwin Payne, ‘Topmost Trail,’ est. $70,000-$90,000. Image courtesy of Skinner
Similarly evocative of the continent’s natural majesty — albeit from the opposite coast — is an 1890 landscape by Charles Courtney Curran, titled Picnic Supper on the Sand Dunes and estimated at $50,000-$70,000. It doubles as a formidable example of the American Impressionist’s idyllic depictions of women.
Forays into folk art include a painting by 20th-century furniture decorator Ralph Eugene Cahoon, Jr., who employed his distinctive, flattened Pennsylvania-Dutch style for a work dubbed Cape Cod Hospital Outpatient Clinic, estimated at $18,000-$22,000. Acquired by a New England surgeon after it was donated by the artist to a benefit auction for The Heart Fund, Cape Cod, it has remained in the buyer’s family until this year, and appears on the auction block for the first time since its commission.
Julian Onderdonk, an impressionist often called the father of Texan painting, and whose works were featured in the White House during the latter Bush presidency, appears at auction with an exquisitely mannered small landscape titled Woodland Stream in Autumn. Its estimate is $18,000-$22,000.
The May 25 auction also includes a small selection of fine sculptures, including some fantastic works in marble and clay. Foremost among them is a statue of St. John the Evangelist by the profoundly influential Thomas Ball, which stands at nearly four feet in height and is carved from Carrara marble. It is estimated at $15,000-$25,000.
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