Displaying items by tag: William Keith

Sotheby’s American Art auction, which took place today, May 22, 2013 in New York, garnered upward of $28 million, surpassing the sale’s high estimate of $24.4 million. Out of the 62 lots offered, 83.9% sold and 93.8% sold by value. This was the third consecutive American art sale at Sotheby’s to exceed its high estimate.

The auction’s top lot was the highly anticipated John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painting Marionettes (1907), which achieved $5.2 million (estimate: $5 million-$7 million). Best known for his portraits of members of high society, Marionettes is a departure from Sargent’s usual subjects. The painting depicts men from Philadelphia’s large Italian American community performing Sicilian puppet theater at the turn of the 20^th century. When Sargent created the work, he was well established and considered to be the preeminent portrait painter of his time. The painting was part of Sargent’s personal collection for over 20 years and was passed down through the artist’s family to the owner who offered the work at Sotheby’s.

Proving the enduring strength of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) in the American art market, six paintings by the artist sold together for $6.5 million, garnering double their overall high estimate of $3 million. Another work by Rockwell, He’s Going to Be Taller than Dad, was the object of seven bidders desire. The domestic scene of a young boy and his dog sold for $2.6 million, far exceeding its high estimate of $700,000.

At the sale, auction records were set for the modern painter Milton Avery (1885-1965), California landscape painter William Keith (1838-1911), and portraitist Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861-1948).

American art sales continue tomorrow, May 23, 2013 at Christie’s in New York.

During his lifetime, landscape painter William Keith (1838–1911) had a reputation that spread widely across the country from his home base in San Francisco. Especially towards the end of his career in the early twentieth century, his works were sought after by major collectors in the East, as well as by Californians.

At the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, four years after his death, Keith’s work was given a separate gallery—he was the only artist to receive such an honor. But as modernism drove nineteenth-century art into oblivion, not even Keith was spared. Keith was luckier than many other California artists of his time; he acquired a tireless advocate and biographer in the Swiss-born Christian Brother, Herman Emanuel Braeg, whose name in the church was Brother Cornelius. A professor of German literature and sacred studies at Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, half an hour east of San Francisco, Cornelius saw his first Keith paintings in naturalist John Muir’s house in 1908, which led to his obsessive quest for the facts of Keith’s life and for Keith paintings in private collections and public institutions throughout Northern California. In this crusade, he was helped by Keith’s widow, Mary McHenry Keith, and niece, Elizabeth Keith Pond, who assembled a multi-volume compendium of material—letters, newspaper reviews, catalogues of his exhibitions, etc., relating to Keith. The “Keith Miscellanea,” eventually found a home at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, while Cornelius’s biography, Keith, Old Master of California, was published in 1942.