Stone Tower

(363)
1940
Wellfleet, MA
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm)
Signed upper right: "E W Dickinson"
possibly dated on right: "1941"
Mr. & Mrs. Philip Sieg
Photo: Babcock Galleries

Notes

Notes: Painted in Wellfleet, MA, first on hill above house. Canvas stretched July 7, painting begun July 9, 10 "Now beginng to enjoy this". 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31. Re-commenced in upstairs of house "encouraged over 40/50", 12 "large canvas ok.", 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, (all journal). Entry of July 10, refers to his painting the same Ulysses subject in Lancieux., p 360. HDB believes this 40/50 must be"Stone Tower", for there is no other in the 1940s journals. It is extremely improbable that such a large canvas, worked on over many days, would be un-recorded in the journals. The signature is not contemporaneous but made in a swatch of paint put on much later for the purpose. It was not unusual for ED to mis-remember a date.

ED note: an "involved composition""unfinished" "Violent angular perspective above the eye. An imaginary tower in various lavenders. All lilac color, my favorite color. I had good ambitions for the piece but it fell down somewhere and I never carried it along. The stone tower structurally was never likely of any building having been constructed that way. The unsteadiness of the station point breaches undertaken perspective matters, and these things about it are very plain, because it isn't a foggy piece but sharp and clear with rather close values of lilac. So nobody hid behind ... it's all right out there. I made that particular breach of usual procedure one other time deliberately and violently in a piece in a oil on canvas of Alice Crowley . . ." , (CR # ).

Provenance

Private collection
Mr. & Mrs. Philip Sieg

Exhibition History

1965 Whitney: Edwin Dickinson. Major retrospective
1966 Gilman Galleries: Edwin Dickinson, Paintings
1966 Katonah Gallery: Paintings and Drawings by Edwin Dickinson
1966 Pennsylvania Academy: Paintings by Edwin Dickinson
1968 SF Art Institute: Untitled '68
1976 PAAM: Edwin Dickinson Retrospective, lent by Frances Dickinson
1977 Syracuse NY: Provincetown Painters: 1890's to 1970's, exhibited only in Provincetown and not listed in catalogue
1979 American Academy & National Institute: Memorial Exhibition: Edwin Dickinson, Charles Eames, Eugene Francis Savage, Edward Durell Stone, Stow Wengenroth
1980–81 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: Edwin Dickinson, Selected Landscapes
1982b NAD: Art Students League Benefit Sale, dated 1941
1983 Hirschl & Adler Galleries: Realism and Abstraction: Counterpoints in American Drawings, 1900-1940
1985 Alpha Gallery: Edwin Dickinson

Additional Images