Rip Matteson

Female Portrait in Pastel, 20th Century

Nude Pencil Drawing pair of Portraits Pencil and pastel on paper, unsigned from the artist portfolio. George Kenneth Hartwell painter and illustrator was born in Fitchburg 1891-1949...

Robert Philipp, 'Self-Portrait with Black Hat', ink and color pastel, c. 1945. Signed in ink, lower right. A fine, spontaneous drawing, on heavy, buff wove paper; the artist's tack holes in the top and bottom left sheet corners, minor rippling in the bottom sheet edge; otherwise in good condition. Image size 16 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches; sheet size 19 1/4 x 12 3/4 inches. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Provenance: Art Students League, from the artist’s personal portfolio. ABOUT THE ARTIST Robert Philipp (1895–1981) was a celebrated American Post-Impressionist painter known for his nudes, still lifes, and portraits. Noted art critic Henry McBride named Philipp one of America's top six painters of his generation. Philipp was an instructor of painting at the Art Students League, New York, for 33 years. Philipp was Secretary of the National Academy of Design, a National Academician, and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London. His composition and painting style has been compared to the art of Edgar Degas and Pierre Auguste Renoir. In 1940, Philipp was invited to Los Angeles by Hollywood producer Louis B. Mayer to paint portraits of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie stars. The same year, Walter Wanger, producer of ‘The Long Voyage Home’, directed by John Ford and based on plays by Eugene O'Neill, contracted with Reeves Lewenthal, head of the Associated American Artists gallery in Manhattan, to bring nine well-known artists to the set and paint scenes from the movie and portraits of the actors in character. The artists included Robert Philipp, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Ernest Fiene, George Schreiber, Luis...