Acquisitions from the Fenimore Art Museum (2): Ashcan School paintings

2/1/25 - Acquisitions - Cooperstown (State of New York), Fenimore Art Museum - We continue our review of recent acquisitions by the Fenimore Art Museum (see news item of 16/9/24) with a group of six paintings by the Ashcan School. Five of these were included in the museum’s exhibition of new acquisitions, on view until the end of December, and all of them, with the exception of the oil on board by Robert Henri, were acquired thanks to the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust. They form the first nucleus of works by this group of realist artists to join the museum, which intends to build up a highly representative collection of American art. Alongside the American Impressionists, the artists of the Ashcan School helped to define the avant-garde in the United States before the aesthetic shock of the Armory Show in 1913.

1. Robert Henri (1865-1929)
Betalo, the Dancer, c. 1909-1910
Oil on canvas - 80 x 64.8 cm
Cooperstown, Fenimore Art Museum
Photo: Richard Walker

See the image in its page

2. Robert Henri (1865-1929)
Dull Weather, Rue de Sevres , c. 1899
Oil on board - 15.2 × 12.1 cm
Cooperstown, Fenimore Art Museum
Photo: Richard Walker

See the image in its page

Two works by Robert Henri, one of the group’s pioneers, were acquired in 2024, a portrait purchased from the Adelson Gallery in New York (ill. 1) and an oil on cardboard depicting a Parisian street (ill. 2) that sold for $8,320 at Bonhams in New York last May. Dull Weather, Rue de Sevres was executed during the artist’s extended stay in the French capital between 1898 and 1900, after his marriage. Although he had left Paris after working at the Académie Julian from 1888 to 1891, Robert Henri returned again and again in the following years from Philadelphia, where he had returned to teach, notably at the School of Design for Women from 1892. Another snow-covered view of the rue de Sèvres, bought by the French State in 1899, is preserved at the Musée d’Orsay…