Indian Dancer
by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919)4¾ x 8⅜ inches
Signed lower left in arrowhead: RABlakelock
Information
Provenance
Private collection, Florida
Sale, James D. Julia, Fairfield, Maine, August 25, 2010, lot 1450, from above (as Indian Encampment at Sunset)
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, acquired from above
Private collection, Bloomington, Illinois, acquired from above, 2013
Note: This painting has been authenticated and catalogued by the University of Nebraska Inventory as NBI-1937, category II.
Artist Biography
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in the backwoods of Upstate New York, he languished in a mental institution as his paintings began to break American records. So great was his fame that at an auction in the Plaza Hotel ballroom the total realized for his paintings exceeded the totals for the Monets, the Rembrandts, the Renoirs, the Pissarros, and the Botticellis.
Forever true to his own vision, he lived in abject poverty in the years before he was institutionalized, and even then he never ceased painting, pulling out his own hair for brush bristles and using tobacco juice to augment the meager
