Information
Provenance
Sale, Doyle, New York, New York, May 21, 2003, lot 83
Alexander Gallery, New York, New York
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, acquired from above, 2005
Private collection, Greenville, Delaware, acquired from above, 2011
Exhibited
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Great Mad Genius Returns, November 11–December 10, 2016
Literature
Elizabeth Wilson, review of The Nature of a Nation: Paintings of the Hudson River School, Questroyal Fine Art, New York, ARTnews 107 (May 2008): 149.
Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Great Mad Genius Returns (New York: Questroyal Fine Art, 2016), plate 18.
Note: Mist in the Valley depicts a well-known area of the Catskills near Kaaterskill Clove and the site of the Catskill Mountain House.
This painting has been authenticated and catalogued by the University of Nebraska Inventory as NBI-864, 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