Lot 822: Gregory Joseph Gillespie (American, 1936-2000), Portrait of Randall Deihl, 1998, Inscribed "Estate of Gregory Gillespie/Peggy Gillespie

Gregory Joseph Gillespie (American, 1936-2000)

Portrait of Randall Deihl, 1998
Inscribed "Estate of Gregory Gillespie/Peggy Gillespie" on the reverse, identified
on labels from Forum Gallery, New York, and Nielsen Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts, on the reverse.
Oil on panel, circular format, 13 in. diameter (33.0 cm), unframed.
Condition: Good.

N.B. Gregory Gillespie was a key figure within the western Massachusetts group of painters known as the "Valley Realists." He is best-known for his meticulously crafted and psychologically complex portraits, such as in the present work which depicts fellow Valley Realist Randall Deihl.


Gillespie trained on both the East and West Coasts, attending Cooper Union and the San Francisco Art Institute for his B.A. and M.A. degrees. He honed his craft in traditional Renaissance painting techniques while living in Italy between 1962 and 1970. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others. He was the subject of a double retrospective with Francis Cohen Gillespie at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, in 2003.