Lot 92: Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1937)

Flowers, circa mid-1910 oil over charcoal on canvas

21 1/2 x 18 in. (54.7 x 45.7 cm)

The artist
Mrs. Helen Kibbey Bruce
Collection of William Kennedy, Marigot, St. Martin, circa 1960
Private Collection

Literature
William C. Agee and Barbara Rose, Patrick Henry Bruce: American Modernist, New York, 1979, no. B11, p. 160, illustrated

One of the pioneers of American modernism, Patrick Henry Bruce was part of a circle of American artists — among them Max Weber and Arthur B. Frost, Jr. — who gathered around Gertrude and Leo Stein and Henri Matisse in Paris at the end of the 20th century’s first decade. Those relationships, together with his own intensive study of Cezanne’s late paintings, led Bruce to begin a series of 15 floral still lifes in early 1910 in which he explored the implications both of Matisse’s color and of Cezanne’s space. Flowers is one of these still lifes, its unpainted voids, fluid drawing and flattened geometries underscoring not only the tulips’ rich color harmonies but also the process of its own creation.