Landscape Silhouette at Twilight
by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919)7¼ x 10¾ inches
Signed illegibly lower right
Information
Provenance
Private collection, Connecticut
Sale, Neal Auction Company, New Orleans, Louisiana, July 8, 2017, lot 917, from above
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, acquired from above
Private collection, Palisades, New York, acquired from above, 2021
Literature
Important American Paintings, Volume XX: Truth (New York: Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, 2019), plate 7.
Note: This painting has been authenticated and catalogued by the University of Nebraska Inventory as NBI-1719, 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
