Additional Images

Provenance:

Boussod Valadon & Cie, Paris, June 29, 1889 (19933);
William Buchanan, New York, December 23, 1889, ff2860;
C.J. McDonough (American Art galleries, April, 18, 1912, Lot 72, $600.00, the Estate of W. Buchanan);
John J. Harrington (trustee);
M. Knoedler & Co., New York (C5826), October 9, 1925;
J.J. Gillespie Company Fine Art Galleries, Pittsburg, PA;
W.H. Remmel, 1934;
Mr. & Mrs. Norman E. Sharp, New York, inscribed to pen and ink label verso backing (by descent);
Spanierman Gallery, LLC. (Skinner, Inc., September 27, 1996, lot 493, $22,000);
Private Collection, Toronto, Canada

Note:

We are grateful to Howard L. Rehs for confirming the authenticity of this work based on high resolution photographs. The work will be included in the catalogue raisonné of the artist's oeuvre as number SF1068. A photo certificate will accompany this lot.

Born into a Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1839, Daniel Ridgway Knight enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts in 1858, where Mary Cassat and Thomas Eakins were his contemporaries. Three years later, he traveled to Paris to study. It was here he met Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley with whom he maintained a life-long relationship.

By 1873, Knight was living in Poissy, west of Paris. He lived among the local peasants and farmers and painted them exclusively as they performed their daily farm duties. Knight, following the tradition established by French artist Jean-Francois Millet, one of the founders of the Barbizon school, depicts the peasant with a monumentality of nobility, where in earlier movements, the main subject was reserved for more exalted subjects. As a result, Ridgway Knight’s farm labourers became the primary focus of the canvas formerly occupied by historic and Biblical figures, or mythological heroes and royalty