The Sunflower, rediscovering an American icon
The auction house Auctie's (Paris- Gien - NY) will have the honor of presenting, on June 21, 2023, at Hôtel Drouot, a rare masterpiece by American naturalist artist Elbridge Ayer Burbank (1858-1949), "The Sunflower" (1894), a poetic ode to the African-American community.
This work, missing since its last public exhibition in Philadelphia in 1895, is the first painting by the artist to be offered at auction in France. Its beauty, its rareness and its character "against the grain" of its heavy historical context, make its rediscovery and sale a event.
Illinois-born nephew of a tycoon with a passion for American history and ethnology,Burbank is most famous in the USA for his gigantic corpus of nearly 1,200 portraits devoted to the 125 Native American tribes. He is notably credited with the only portrait painted during the lifetime of the mythical Apache chief Geronimo. His works can be found in the most important American institutions (Chicago, Washington, New York, etc.), but none at present completes the French national collections.
Early in his career, in the1890s, he devoted a few rare paintings to the African-American community, with a simple, benevolent and fraternal outlook that contrasted radically with the violence of the ambient social climate, characterized by the segregationist laws.
The empathic power of his images earned him criticism at the time from some who considered this familiarity unseemly.
"The Sunflower", dated 1894, is part of Burbank's characteristically soft and poetic mood. This young boy dozes, flower in hand, as a kind of allegory of innocence, where the frictions of recent history are as if erased. Burbank's pioneering eye is naked of prejudice, his model escaping the clichés then in vogue: he is neither slave, nor victim, nor exotic, he is American. Moreover, "The Sunflower" can be linked to another portrait, "American Beauty", painted in 1893. Depicting a young African-American boy inhaling the scent of a rose, this painting would win Burbank great critical recognition, which would help him to combat his bipolar affective disorders, which would complicate his late career.
"The Sunflower", with its visual force worthy of a fraternity manifesto, a key work from Burbank's early days, will be offered with an estimate of 10 to 15,000 euros.
Access the press kit: Burbank press kit
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