Sale 2472 - African-American Fine Art, April 5, 2018

4 c PALMER HAYDEN (1890 - 1973) The Steps . Oil on fiber board, 1925. 292x406 mm; 11 1 / 2 x16 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto. Inscribed “Painting in summer of 1925 kept as test for palette permanency” in pencil, verso. Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection, Washington, DC. This charming landscape of a Maine coastal town is one of the earliest oil paintings by the artist to come to auction. During the summers of 1925 and 1926, Palmer Hayden was lent the use of a cottage in Boothbay, Maine, and arranged to exchange labor for instruction, room and board at the Commonwealth Art Colony. He painted around Portland and Haverstraw on the weekends. He showed many of these landscapes and marine studies in his first solo exhibition at the Civic Club, New York, in April of 1926. In December, his oil painting of Boothbay Harbor won the Harmon Foundation prize, beating out the other finalist Hale Woodruff, and gained him passage to Paris. Leininger-Miller, pp. 71-72. [10,000/15,000]