Maine Antique Digest, December 2016

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8-B Maine Antique Digest, December 2016
- AUCTION -
8-B
If this one wasn’t signed “W.
PEIRCE” and documented
with a photograph of the life-
size painting in situ on the wall
of a Paris apartment and with
corresponding entries in Peirce’s
diary, I doubt that anyone would
have guessed it was painted
by Waldo Peirce. According
to his writings, it is very likely
a portrait of Antonia Merce
y Luque (1890-1936), better
known as the flamenco dancer
La Argentina. That supposition
is supported by Peirce’s entries
in which he mentions a painting
in the style of Goya’s portraits
of the Duchess of Alba, and
by the inclusion of Japanese
cloth in the woman’s skirts. La
Argentina was a major influence
on the Japanese dancer Kazuo
Ohno (1906-2010) and his dance
form known as butoh. The
enormous 78" x 37" painting
was well appreciated with an
estimate-beating price of $8775.
Thomaston Place photo.
It seems as though everyone is selling Waldo
Peirce (1884-1970) paintings these day, as
literally dozens of them have come forth in
the last year or so. He was represented by
five paintings in this sale, including this large
50" x 38" oil on canvas portrait of the actress
Ivy Troutman (1883-1979), the second of
Peirce’s four wives. It is initialed and dated
1940, and signed and titled on reverse. Peirce
and Troutman joined the colony of American
expatriates in Paris, along with such notable
literary figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.
Troutman was primarily a Broadway stage
actress. Her only known motion picture,
The House with Nobody in It, was a silent
three-reeler made in 1915. The painting sold
successfully within the estimate for $4680.
The $5000/7000 estimate seemed pretty
reasonable for this three-quarter-length
portrait of Collette Ramsey Baker (1918-
2010) by Howard Chandler Christy (1872-
1952). Perhaps that’s because she wasn’t
nude like many of his subjects. Baker was
a good friend of Christy’s and the founder
of the Deafness Research Foundation, now
known as the Hearing Health Foundation.
Baker lived with substantial hearing loss
until age 35 when her hearing was restored
by an early fenestration operation. The
estimate proved accurate when the
painting sold for $7200.
The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was known by at least 30 names
over the course of his life. Sold together, two of his framed woodblock prints from the
series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” 1830-35, At Sea off Kazusa (Kazusa was the
pre-20th-century name for a province on the eastern coast of Japan), and View From
Lake Suwa in Shinano Province (in central Japan), obliterated the $600/800 estimate
and finally ended at $15,210. Thomaston Place photo.
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