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35
APRICOTS 1866
ALBERT
MOORE
1841-1893
Oil
on canvas, 42.5 x 28.5 (16.75 x 11.25)
Signed,
with anthemion (on wall, top centre)
Provenance:
J.Glover in 1894; J.Gresham by 1912, sale Christie's 12 July
1917 (100) bought Wallis for 90 gns.; J.Croal Thompson, sale
Christie's 29 November 1918 (59) bought Connell for 75 gns.;
W. Beatson Blair, sale Christie's 20 December 1946 (74 with
another) bought Dent for 16 gns.; Cecil French.
Exhibited:
Royal Academy, 1866 (190); York, Exhibition of the Moore
Family Pictures, 1912 (138); Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle
upon Tyne, Albert Moore and his Contemporaries, 1972
(11), repr. pl.4.
Literature:
A.L.Baldry, Albert Moore: His Life and Works, 1894,
pp.32-3, 35, 102, repr. be-fore p.31; G. Reynolds, Victorian
Painting, 1966, p.122.
R Asleson, Albert Moore, Phaidon Press Ltd, London, 2003, pp. 15, 86/7, 100, 104, 108, 111, illustrated p.80.
Two
draped women standing before a high white wall. The one to
the left, wearing a di-apha-nous white gown and a blue headdress,
is facing left with her head turned towards the viewer. Her
companion, in a pink gown with orange headdress, back to the
viewer, rests her left arm on the other's shoulder, her head
is turned to the right as is her outstretched right hand with
which she picks an apricot from a branch.
A
study for the drapery of the right-hand side figure, in black
and white chalk on brown paper is reproduced in Baldry, opp.
p.8.
Jane Vickers has observed, in the catalogue of Pre-Raphaelites.
Painters and Patrons in the North East, Laing Art Gallery,
Newcastle upon Tyne, 1989, that Moore virtually repeated the
pose of the left hand figure in his large single-figure painting
A Garden (174.5 x 88), painted in 1869 and now in the
Tate Gallery, London.
Apricots
was shown at the Royal Academy in 1866 together with a smaller
unrelated painting Pomegranates, (25.4 x 35.5) which was bequeathed
to the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, by Cecil French in 1954.
Both, like many of Moore's subsequent works, took their titles
from a minor detail in the painting.
According
to Richard Green, in the catalogue of the Laing Art Gallery
exhibition, Apricots seems likely to have been the first work
which Moore signed with an anthemion device, a practice that
predated his friend Whistler's butterfly signature.
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