Description

Charcoal and Pencil Study Of A Woman. Bryson Burroughs. Met Museum Curator. 1924. Shipped with USPS Priority Mail. This beautiful drawing is by the artist and former curator Bryson Burroughs. It is Charcoal and Colored Pencils on Paper and was probably done in the 1930s. The 14.75"H x 10.5"W picture is set in a 17.75"H x 14"W matted and glassed black frame. It is a lovely rich piece in which Bryson captured the softness of the woman's skin and her expression with a faint knowing smile with his use of shadow and blending. He is a skilled artist and it really comes through on this piece. Her cloths and the background are just sketched out so that you concentrate on her face and hands as she gazes out into your eyes. He signed it B. Burroughs in the lower right hand corner. The picture is in excellent Condition with no damage that I can see . The paper is excellent quality, you can even see its watermark at the correct angle. The frame shows a little wear but no damage. It is strong and secure, with wire to hang it by. Bryson Burroughs was born in 1869 in the Boston suburb of Hyde Park. While still young, he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where he later took art classes at the Cincinnati Museum. In 1889, Burroughs moved to New York City and enrolled in the Art Students League where he studied under Kenyon Cox and H. Siddons Mowbray. After receiving a Chanler Scholarship in 1890, the artist spent the next five years in Europe where he studied at the Academie Julian and traveled extensively through France, England and Italy. While in Paris, Burroughs was greatly influenced by the artist Puvis de Chavannes, renowned for his murals in the Boston Public Library. There is a tremendous similarity between the works of these two artists and "...what [Burroughs] emulated in Puvis' style was an overall simplification of the painted surface, a reduction of modeling to eliminate chiaroscuro, an emphasis on linear outline to delineate major passages, a palette of lighter tonality, and a preference for emotionally subdued subjects based on religion and mythology" (Douglas Dreishoon). In 1906, Burroughs became Assistant Curator of Paintings under Roger Fry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, serving as chief curator from 1909-1934. Of Burroughs performance in this position, the art critic Forbes Watson commented that "...the Metropolitan Museum has had the greatest good fortune to enjoy the services of the most broadminded, intuitive, sagacious, and informed curator of his day". Freed from economic restraint, Burroughs continued to paint classical works infused with contemporary wit and relevance. This "classicism" (an obsession with narrative content, traditional pictorial perspective, and figuration) was adapted by successive generations of American painters, which included Kenneth Hayes Miller, Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, Alexander Brook, Eugene Speicher, and Leon Kroll. Burroughs exhibited at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901 (medal); Worcester, Massachusetts, 1904 (prize); St. Louis Exposition, 1904, (medal) and was an Associate Member of the National Academy. His paintings can be found in many fine museums including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Please see all the pictures as they are a large part of the description ss they speak volumes more than I can describe here. TY