Displaying items by tag: george washington

Museum-goers are anticipating this fall’s debut of the Louvre Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, part of a long-term cultural agreement with the French government. One recent acquisition may surprise visitors: Museum officials in Abu Dhabi say they have paid Los Angeles’s Armand Hammer Foundation an undisclosed sum for a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

The 1822 painting shows the first American president sitting at a desk, one hand resting on a document, the other cradling a sword hilt. Other Washington portraits by Stuart have sold for around $8 million, according to dealers and auction records.

Its death sentence came down in a public courtroom, but the priceless estate of the Corcoran Gallery of Art is being divvied up under a cloak of secrecy.

Museum-goers who grew up with Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington and George Inness’s landscapes don’t know if these and other treasures from the city’s oldest private museum will hang on the walls of the National Gallery of Art or at one of the Smithsonian museums — or if they will be consigned to a storage facility.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Seth Kaller, one of the world’s leading dealers in rare historic documents, will exhibit and offer for sale George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation in conjunction with Leigh Keno, President of Keno Auctions, now through November 26.

The Thanksgiving Proclamation is priced at $8.4 million, and is the only example in private hands. The only other Washington-signed copy was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1921. The document was offered at Christie’s on November 14, 2013, where it was expected to sell for upwards of $12,000,000. Kaller represents the document’s owner, who has decided to offer the manuscript through exhibition and private sale.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 in Wal-Mart's hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas, with a respectable collection of work by famous artists from Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" to a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart.

But the museum has just opened a massive exhibition of contemporary art called "State of the Art" that could be a game-changer. The museum is sometimes mocked by critics from outside the region for its location and Wal-Mart connections — its permanent collection was funded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton — but the new show represents a serious effort to introduce contemporary art to a mainstream audience far from the rarefied galleries of hipster neighborhoods and urban centers.

One of the most famous portraits of George Washington will soon get a high-tech examination and face-lift of sorts with its first major conservation treatment in decades.

The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has begun planning the conservation and digital analysis of the full-length "Lansdowne" portrait of the first president that was painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796, museum officials told The Associated Press. The 8-foot-by-5-foot picture is considered the definitive portrait of Washington as president after earlier images in military uniform.

The first significant new museum of American art in nearly half a century debuted in 2011. But to view Crystal Bridges' collection—from a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington to Jackson Pollock canvases—you don't travel to New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. You head down a forested ravine in a town in northwestern Arkansas.

As museum founder and Walmart heiress Alice Walton scooped up tens of millions of dollars' worth of art from across the country, thinly veiled snobbish rhetoric began to trickle out from the coasts. Most notably, when she purchased Asher B. Durand's 1849 "Kindred Spirits" from the New York Public Library for $35 million, some culturati bristled at the thought that this famed Hudson River School landscape would be leaving for Bentonville. The controversy raised the question: Who deserves access to great art?

The Louvre in Paris, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Terra Foundation in Chicago have announced the third installation in their four-year collaboration focusing on the history of American art. "American Encounters: Anglo-American Portraiture in an Era of Revolution," which is currently on view at the Louvre, examines how portraiture style evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as American and European painters were influenced by each other.

The exhibition features five works that have never before been exhibited together -- "George Washington after the Battle of Princeton," attributed to Charles Wilson Peale; "Portrait of Hugh Percy, Second Duke of Northumberland" by Gilbert Stuart; "Lieutenant Robert Hay of Spott" by Henry Raeburn; "George Washington (The Constable-Hamilton Portrait)" by Gilbert Stuart; and "George Washington, Porthole Portrait" by Rembrandt Peale. When its presentation at the Louvre ends on April 28, 2014, the exhibition will travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (May 17, 2014-September 15, 2014) and to the High Museum of Art (September 28, 2014-January 18, 2015).  

Guillaume Faroult, the Louvre's Curator of Paintings, said, "The potential for new scholarship and education that comes from bringing these five portraits together is exactly the spirit of our international collaboration and shows how much all of our institutions have to gain from it, as now our visitors are familiarizing themselves with American painting and are greatly anticipating this third installation."

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has lent two paintings by Edward Hopper to the White House. ‘Cobb’s Barns, South Truro’ and ‘Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro’, both oil on canvas works painted between 1930 and 1933 in Cape Cod, are currently on view in the Oval Office.

The paintings from the Whitney, which holds the world’s largest archive of Hopper’s works, were created while Hopper and his wife were renting a summer cottage in South Truro. From the home, Hopper executed a series of drawings and paintings of the buildings on his landlord’s farm, capturing the structures from various angles and at different times of the day. Both of the paintings from the Whitney capture Hopper’s masterful use of light and the quiet stillness that pervades much of his work.  

The two Hopper paintings will join Rembrandt Peale’s ‘George Washington,’ George Henry Story’s ‘Abraham Lincoln,’ Thomas Moran’s ‘The Three Tetons,’ Childe Hassam’s ‘The Avenue in the Rain,’ and Norman Rockwell’s ‘Statue of Liberty,’ all of which belong to the permanent White House collection.

California based auction house, Profiles in History, announced today that they will exhibit highlights from their upcoming auction, The Property of a Distinguished American Private Collector. The exhibit will be held at Douglas Elliman’s Madison Avenue Gallery from December 3 through December 9. The exhibit was supposed to be held at Fraunces Tavern Museum, but an alternate location was needed after Hurricane Sandy inflicted a fair amount of damage on the museum.

The Property of a Distinguished American Private Collector includes over 3,000 manuscripts that will be auctioned off at a series of sales beginning on December 18. The first part of the sale will include 300 of the most important letters and manuscripts from the collection and carries an estimate in excess of $8,000,000.

One of the most notable highlights of the exhibition and sale is a four-page handwritten letter by Vincent van Gogh. In the letter written to his close friends, Monsieur and Madame Ginoux, just seven months before his death, van Gogh talks of his failing mental and physical. He writes, “Disease exists to remind us we are not made of wood…” The letter, penned on January 20, 1890, is expected to bring between $200,000 and $300,000.

Other important documents on view include several manuscripts by George Washington, a Thomas Paine manuscript, a rare Emily Dickinson letter, and other correspondences by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Edison.

One of the biggest sales at Doyle New York’s Rare Books, Autographs, and Photographs auction on November 5 was an important letter by George Washington. Purchased by a private collector for $362,500, the letter surpassed its pre-sale estimate of $80,000-$100,000. It was the fourth highest price paid at auction for a letter by Washington and the highest price for a single-page letter.

Written to James McHenry, Washington’s wartime aide on December 10, 1783, the President writes of his intention to resign as Continental Commander and become “translated into a private Citizen.” The letter was sold with McHenry’s archives in 1859 to Baltimore collector William T. Walters. It remained in Walters’ family until it was offered at Doyle’s auction.

The entire sale totaled $1,604,594, surpassing the pre-sale estimate of $849,200 to $1,255,000 and 90% of lots sold. Besides George Washington’s letter, major sales included John Webster’s The Deuils Law Case… (1623), the first quarto edition, which achieved $25,000; a set of Author’s Autograph Edition of Whitman that sold for $22,500; and a letter from Paul Gauguin to Camille Pissarro that brought $28,125.