Easter Lilies

Provenance

James R. Bakker, Boston, Massachusetts

Private collection, acquired from above, 1994

Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, New York, October 6, 2021, lot 88, from above

Exhibited

Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts, Festival of the Arts, July 1957 (as Easter Lillies)

Related Works 

Tiger Lilies, after 1925, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, signed lower left: JANE PETERSON; Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut

Tiger Lilies, oil on canvas, 25 x 20 inches, signed lower left: JANE PETERSON.; Endicott College Collection, Walter J. Manninen Trust, Beverly, Massachusetts

Note

A 1922 article by the artist in The Garden Magazine, published by Doubleday, expresses the importance of floral subject matter to her. She wrote:

I have painted flowers in every possible way: as a botanist, I have dissected and studied and analyzed their parts and named them; as a designer, I have conventionalized them and used them for patterns; I have painted their portraits, doing one flower over and over again in various positions and poses; I have painted them realistically in bunches paying careful attention to the characteristics of each individual specimen; I have painted them as still life to study their color and quality and atmosphere; I have painted them decoratively, taking their ever impressive beauty only as a suggestion for the creative imagination; and I painted them sentimentally because I wished to commemorate the gift of a friend._[1]

_[1] Cynthia Roznoy and Arlene Katz Nichols, Jane Peterson: At Home and Abroad (Waterbury, CT: Mattatuck Museum, 2017), 43.