Artist Dates: 1888-1969
Painting Title: The Hollyhock
Painting Date: 1939
Medium: Oil on Canvas Signature: Signed Lower Right Provenance: Private Collection
Condition: Very Good
Size Unframed: 32 x 36
Size Framed: 37 x 41
Frame Condition: Mint Reproduction
Artist Best Price: $23,500
Our Price: SOLD
Throughout, his focus was always nature, but not nature morte. Instead Stevens gives us his unique sense of nature as a deep force concerned with its own survival, a survival not without scars and weathering, something almost beyond mankind, and linked to a force that is even stronger than we can know. A superb craftsman, Stevens painted rapidly and with assurance, but always took time to find the best vantage point. He understood the importance of placing himself where he could create the best composition and “took the liberty of moving objects so that the composition would meet his desires.” And his juxtaposition of the landscape is for a purpose. This is what he meant when he commented that “fine pictures are the result of fine minds.” There is in the later works a vision that those who have trekked these hills recognize as almost an obsession that led Stevens to memorialize the distant cemetery on the hillside where his wife was buried. Nature is often brooding, sometimes malevolent, grotesque and always powerful. The Hollyhock, which we offer, dominates the human dwelling alongside, but its power in this work is joyous, and Stevens would have known the plant's primitive and Druidic medicinal associations.
When Stevens reurned to Rockport, it had started to become the painterly retreat that would make it the New England impressionists' coastal hub. And he studied here with Duveneck, among others, including Frank Benson, Philip Hale and William Paxton. Stevens, along with his friend Aldro Hibbard, was instrumental in organizing the Rockport Art Association in 1921, with the goal of making art more accessible to common people. He painted murals in the Dedham and Rockport post offices, the Boston City Hall, and several schools in Boston.
In 1934 he moved to an old, remodeled farmhouse in Conway Massachusetts which looked north towards Mount Monadnock (seen in the background in The Hollyhock), and where he built a studio and painted New England scenes for the rest of his life. Except for summer trips made in the 1960s to Lubec, Maine, Campobello Island and Grand Manan Island, Stevens lived and painted in Conway for the rest of his life. Stevens died on June 10, 1969 in nearby Greenfield, Massachussetts.
He was Professor of Painting at Princeton University, and also taught at Boston University, and at the Springfield Art Museum. He was a National Academician and a member of the American Watercolor Society. He won awards at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; American Watercolor Society; and in New Haven, Springfield, Washington and Rockport. The 1930's brought Stevens commercial and personal success through a number of magazine covers for The American Legion Magazine. He exhibited at the NAD, 1906 (age 18); and among many others at PAFA annually, 1912-37; Corcoran biennials, 1914-28 (5 times, with prizes); Quincy, 1932 (medal); Wash. Ldscp. Club, 1939 (prize); Wash. Art Club, 1941 (prize); Ogunquit, ME, 1952-54 (prizes); Gloucester, MA, 1958 (prize); and his work hangs in museums in Rochester, Springfield, Boston, Gloucester, Rockport, and Washington. By 1964, Stevens had won more awards than any other living artist.
