A Lake, Moonlight
by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919)20⅛ x 25⅛ inches
Signed lower right in arrowhead: R.A. Blakelock
Provenance
Private collection
Sale, Christies, London, United Kingdom, February 19, 1971, lot 133, from above
Private collection, Scarsdale, New York
Related Works
Moonlight, ca. 1883–1889, oil on canvas, 30 x 25⅛ inches; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
A Waterfall, Moonlight, 1886, oil on canvas, 56¼ x 35¾ inches, signed lower left in arrowhead; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
Moonlight Sonata, ca. 1889–1892, oil on canvas, 30⅜ x 22 inches, signed lower right in arrowhead; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Brook by Moonlight, before 1891, oil on canvas, 72⅛ x 48 1/16 inches; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
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
