Spring Gems
Sotheby’s next American art sale will feature prominent works across many categories
On May 19 Sotheby’s will present its spring American Art sale in Newyork City.the auction, which will feature around 70 major works, will include important works from Thomas Hart Benton, Francis Augustus Silva, Fairfield Porter, Guy Pène du Bois and many others. The Benton, which comes from the collection of Marylou Whitney, is expected to be one of the stars of the sale.the work, titled Noon, was created by the famous regionalist painter in 1939 and shows a farmer going about his daily chores on a half-tilled section of farmland.two mules or horses are hitched to a tiller underneath a tree, with a distant farmhouse barely visible over Benton’s famous swooping hills. The painting, tempera and oil on board, is estimated at $700,000 to $1 million. “It’s an incredibly dynamic composition, with the figure and the two horses and a really wonderful background and landscape. It includes all the elements you are looking for with a Benton,” says Sotheby’s American art specialist Charlotte Mitchell.“it really comes to life when you see it, especially the undulating hills, remarkable clouds and the flowers in the foreground.”
Also from the Whitney collection is Herbert Haseltine’s Counter-point with First Flight and Foal, a gilt bronze from 1954 showing three horses.the work shows one of Whitney’s favorite subjects: racehorses.
Dubbed the “Queen of Saratoga,” Whitney discovered horseracing while married to her second husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny”whitney, the son of Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, the artist and art patron whose name is now on the Whitney Museum of American Art in Newyork City. Gertrude’s art and philanthropy, as well as the continued work of her son, would also play an important role in the founding of the Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo