Lot 11
PAUL PEEL, R.C.A. (1860-1892)
Additional Images
Provenance:
Private collection, Germany
Note:
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century ambitious artists went to Paris. More than ambitious, Paul Peel was also astute, talented, and went there in 1881 after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia from 1877 to 1880, where his instructors included Thomas Eakins.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century ambitious artists went to Paris. More than ambitious, Paul Peel was also astute, talented, and went there in 1881 after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia from 1877 to 1880, where his instructors included Thomas Eakins.
Before taking up residence in Paris, Peel spent part of the spring of 1881 at the American artists’ colony in Brittany at Pont-Aven. Early in 1882, while studying in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Peel was elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in whose annual exhibition he showed The Spinner (1882), now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He returned to Pont-Aven that summer and again in 1884, the year of this painting. The paintings he exhibited at the RCA and the Paris Salons are known for their endearing portrayals of childhood and maternal care with fine painterly finish, the best known of this type of large figurative painting being his After the Bath (1890) in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Concurrent with these major studio paintings of figures, Peel painted smaller landscapes of which this limpid view of Pont-Aven is quintessential. These paintings strike a different note from Peel’s Salon paintings in their careful attention to atmosphere, architecture, and people. For some they evoke Impressionist painting through their glorious light and calm. They also owe a debt to Peel’s PAFA teacher Thomas Eakins, whose refined and sensitive portrayal of the interplay of light, water and air in his stellar, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (1871) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Starting Out After Rail (1874) in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, resonate in this view of Pont-Aven.