2024 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction – Live Online Auction / Lot 4848 / 241 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Label, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
Label, J. N. Bartfield Galleries, New York, New York
Label, Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Cody, Wyoming
An original bill of sale from J. N. Bartfield Galleries will accompany the lot.
Leigh biographer June DuBois wrote, “During the lifetime of William Robinson Leigh, art critics could not agree on an appropriate label for his style. One critic, out of bounden duty, called him a ‘Romantic Realist!’ Though the description falls short, there is a degree of truth in the critic’s term, for Leigh’s sensibility and Southern heritage scarcely permitted him to view the world other than romantically.
“Every moment of living and working in the West – magnificent and awe-inspiring and ever-exciting to Leigh – proved a delight. Each autumn when he first returned to New York, aglow with inspiration, his luggage brimming with studies, life would seem wonderful.
“Leigh’s studio gradually became almost a Southwest museum in miniature. Books pertaining to the Southwest as well as other subjects of interest to Leigh – art, music, astrology, history, travel, archaeology, anthropology, among others – lined the high walls.”
In his book The Western Pony Leigh wrote, “I find in the West the truly typical and distinctively American motifs, a grandeur in Natural surroundings, a dramatic simplicity in life which can be found nowhere else. In that life, in those surroundings … marvelously varied and abundant – the horse plays a major role.”
PROVENANCE
William J. Williams, Washington, D.C.
J. N. Bartfield Galleries, New York, New York, 2012
Robert D. Reed Collection, Jacksonville, Florida
EXHIBITED
Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Cody, Wyoming, 1975
