Sale 2487 - African-American Fine Art, October 4, 2018

4 c JOHN HAROLD DEVON ROBINSON (1895 - 1970) Untitled (Brooklyn Bridge) . Oil on linen canvas, 1925. 508x406 mm; 20x16 inches. Initialed and dated in oil, lower right. Provenance: private collection, Pennsylvania. This canvas is a very scarce painting by John Harold Devon or J. H. D. Robinson, whom little is known about today, but was fairly active during the Harlem Renaissance in New York. He exhibited paintings in two significant exhibitions of the 1930s - Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists , Harmon Foundation, New York in February of 1931, and Paintings and Sculpture by American Negro Artists , Renaissance Society, University of Chicago in December of 1936. According to a brief biography found in the Negro Statistical Bulletin of 1935, issued by the Department of Commerce, Robinson studied at the Brooklyn Art School, the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, New York University and the College Art Association. The biography adds that he painted four canvases under the P.W.A.P, and also exhibited at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York in 1934. This is the first painting by the artist to come to auction. [6,000/9,000]