Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 8

Honore Sharrer
"Woman Listening" Honore Sharrer, Magical Realism Landscape with Flora & Figure

$8,800
$11,00020% Off
£6,572.22
£8,215.2720% Off
€7,626.08
€9,532.6020% Off
CA$12,188.06
CA$15,235.0820% Off
A$13,662.72
A$17,078.4020% Off
CHF 7,124.80
CHF 8,90620% Off
MX$167,471.60
MX$209,339.4920% Off
NOK 90,283.17
NOK 112,853.9620% Off
SEK 85,835.05
SEK 107,293.8120% Off
DKK 56,900.44
DKK 71,125.5520% Off
Shipping
Retrieving quote...
The 1stDibs Promise:
Authenticity Guarantee,
Money-Back Guarantee,
24-Hour Cancellation

About the Item

Honore Sharrer (1920 - 2009) Woman Listening Signed lower right Caseine on paper 15 x 20 inches Provenance: Forum Gallery, New York Private Collection Honore Sharrer became celebrated as a prodigy of realism in 1944, when at age twenty-four, the Museum of Modern Art bought her study for a federal mural, Workers and Paintings (1943). At a time when most artists were moving into abstraction, she chose to paint small, meticulous panels, expressing her sympathy with the common people of this country. Sharrer was born in West Point, New York. Her father was an army colonel, and her mother was an artist who had studied with Robert Henri. From her earliest years, Sharrer and her mother shared a companionable interest in art and spent weekends in the country painting and picnicking together. When she was fourteen, her father was stationed in Paris on the Ile St. Louis, and she attended her first life-drawing class at the Academie Colarossi with her mother. Much younger than the other students, she remembers being embarrassed by the nude model. Unlike the French girls at the lycee, Sharrer was free to roam the city unchaperoned, visiting the museums and absorbing the Old Masters at the Louvre. When her father was transferred to San Diego, California, she attended the Bishops School, a private school in La Jolla. In her senior year, she won a $1000 prize from "American Magazine" in a national competition. Sharrer vividly remembers the powerful impression made on her by a fifteenth century painting by Hieronymus Bosch, "Christ Crowned with Thorns," at the San Diego Gallery of Fine Arts. She identified with this traditional mode and decided to study at the Yale University art school, which was a stronghold of rigorous, traditional training before the arrival of Josef Albers and his Bauhaus-modern curriculum. After a year, Sharrer spent an additional year at the more free-wheeling California School of Fine Arts. During World War II, she worked as a welder in a shipyard in Hoboken, New Jersey. There she closely observed the working-class types that she began to depict in her paintings. At a time when most artists were turning toward abstraction, Sharrer looked back to the realistic public art of the Federal Art Project of the 1930s, identifying strongly with its "human content and monumental form." She entered competitions for government post offices, and her mural study for the Worcester, Massachusetts, post office brought her to the attention of Lincoln Kirsten, who bought the study for the Museum of Modern Art. After creating several small paintings, rendered like the works of Flemish and early Renaissance masters (Man at the Fountain (1948)), Sharrer embarked on an ambitious polyptych made up of five panels, entitled A Tribute to the American Working People (1951). Shown at Knoedlers Gallery in 1951, this work has recently been in the Sara Roby Foundation collection in New York. Although small in size, it is monumental in conception. Organized like a Renaissance altarpiece, A Tribute presents pictures of everyday America, -a worker in front of a factory, a schoolteacher and her class, a country fair. Sharrer has explained, "I conceive of the people of this painting as individuals with petty pretensions and commercial vulgarities, but despite this crust of stereotype, they are the vital determining majority in which the cycle of birth, marriage, struggle, and death always seem to be pared down to elemental energy and simplicity of purpose". Four and a half years of arduous effort, and over four hundred photographs and sketches were applied to the research and execution of this work. She spent an entire day in an elementary school classroom just to study a particular kind of gesture, -of friendly play between a white child and a black child. The complex drawings were traced onto gesso panels and rendered in a technique so meticulous that painting one eye took her an entire day. In addition to receiving major articles in Life and Art News, Sharrer exhibited in "Fourteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art and won various awards. Between 1951 and 1969, during the wave of abstract art, she retreated into comparative isolation on her farm in Rochester, New York, where she lives and works in seclusion. She has been married since 1947 to Perez Zagorin, a history professor, and has one son. Emerging after this hiatus, Sharrer showed larger satirical works, which were described in Arts (April 1969) as "devastating examples of social, political, and religious satire". "The Last Supper" is shown as the Mad-Hatters tea party. Lecherous old men, fully dressed monkeys, and fornicating dogs were part of the mélange, which was painted in a looser style. In 1972, her painting "Leda and the Dwarf", won the Childe Hassam purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1978, "A Tribute to the American Working People" was sent to the U.S.S.R. in a major exhibition of American paintings selected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  • Creator:
    Honore Sharrer (1920, American)
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 16 in (40.64 cm)Width: 21 in (53.34 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New York, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1841211234962

More From This Seller

View All
"Into the Woods" Henry Prellwitz, Lyrical Woman In Wooded Landscape Painting
By Henry Prellwitz
Located in New York, NY
Henry Prellwitz Into the Woods Oil on board 11 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches Henry Prellwitz studied art at the Art Students League of New York, where his chief mentor was Thomas Wilmer Dewing; he later became its director.[3] He also studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1892, he set up his studio in the Holbein Studios building on West 55th Street in Manhattan, where his future wife, the artist Edith Mitchill, also had a studio. They married in 1894 and had a son, Edwin. By the mid 1890s, he was teaching portrait painting at the Pratt Institute, where one of his students was the Cubist artist Max Weber. In 1899, Henry and Edith moved to the north shore of Peconic Bay on Long Island, where their artist friends Irving Ramsay Wiles and Edward August Bell were already established. They painted plein air paintings and also worked in adjoining studios at High House, their Peconic Bay home. Prellwitz painted Impressionist and Tonalist waterscapes of Peconic Bay and allegorical figure paintings such as the 1904 Lotus and Laurel. He exhibited mainly on the east coast and at expositions like the St. Louis World's Fair, where he won a silver medal. He won the Third Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design (NAD) in 1893 for The Prodigal Son, and his Venus won the Thomas B. Clarke Prize at the 1907 NAD exhibition for the best figure composition by an American citizen painted in the United States. Both Prellwitzes disappeared into obscurity for several decades after their deaths in the early 1940s. Rediscovered in the 1980s, they have been called one of the best-kept secrets in art...
Category

Early 20th Century Modern Figurative Paintings

Materials

Oil, Board

“Woman with Rose” Lily Harmon, Female American Modernism Mid-century
By Lily Harmon
Located in New York, NY
Lily Harmon (1912 - 1998) Woman with Rose Ink and gouache on board 23 x 19 inches Lily Harmon, was an artist who worked in portraiture, assemblage and book illustration, and whose ...
Category

Mid-20th Century American Modern Abstract Paintings

Materials

Ink, Gouache, Board

"A Sunny Corner" Eugenie M. Heller, Impressionist Garden Landscape In Bloom
Located in New York, NY
Eugenie M. Heller A Sunny Corner, circa 1900 Signed lower right Oil on board 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches Eugenie M. Heller (1867 - 1952) was active/lived in New York, Massachusetts. Heller studied with Weir, Whistler, Amen-Jean, Grasset and Rodin. Eugenie Heller...
Category

Early 1900s American Impressionist Figurative Paintings

Materials

Oil, Board

"Spring" Milton Derr, Lyrical Modernist Landscape, Bright Green and Blue Hues
Located in New York, NY
Milton Derr Spring, 1982 Signed lower right; titled and dated verso Oil on canvas 26 x 28 inches Provenance Acquired by descent from the artist to the present owner Milton Derr wa...
Category

1980s American Modern Figurative Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Pink Garden" Gerome Kamrowski, American Surrealist 1947 Expressive Abstraction
By Gerome Kamrowski
Located in New York, NY
Gerome Kamrowski Pink Garden, 1947 Signed lower left Watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches Gerome Kamrowski was born in Warren, Minnesota, on January 19, 1914. In 1932 he enrolled in ...
Category

1940s Surrealist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

"MacMahan's Maine, " Howard Everett Giles, Figurative Landscape, Impressionism
Located in New York, NY
Howard Everett Giles (1876 - 1955) MacMahan's Maine Oil on canvas backed with board 30 x 30 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Art Institute of Chicago Christie's New York, December 8, 2011, Lot 2 Howard Giles spent most of his career in New York City, where he was an educator, magazine illustrator, and painter who espoused the theory of Dynamic Symmetry. He was born in Brooklyn, and as a young man worked in a New York railroad office. Financial support of a family friend allowed him to study at the Art Students League with H. Siddons Mowbray. In early 1910, he became an illustrator for Scribner's Magazine, and in 1912, on sketching assignment for Scribner's went to England. During World War I, he did illustration for Harper's Monthly Magazine, and many of his images were 'roaring twenties' genre and figure paintings. In 1912, he began teaching life classes at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (later Parsons School of Design), and remained there until the late 1920s. During that time, he was also a part-time instructor at the Childs-Walker School in Boston, and accepted numerous invitations to lecture including at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Arts and Wellesley College. His initial painting style was Impressionism, but he grew increasingly interested in other scientific, aesthetic theories. He worked with Jay Hambridge from 1916 to 1919, applying Hambridge's theory of Dynamic Symmetry to his painting and his lecture topics. From 1922 to 1926, Giles also worked with and was influenced in his own painting by colorist theorist Denman Ross, who espoused a limited and related color palette. For many of his paintings, Giles used watercolor although he also painted in oil and pastels. During the last years before his retirement when he moved to Woodstock...
Category

Early 20th Century American Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Panel

You May Also Like

David P. Curtis Figure Landscape Painting Woman in the Garden Scene
Located in Rockport, MA
Bask in the charm of a sunlit garden filled with vibrant blooms. A woman in a soft hat sits quietly, perfectly at ease among the lush greenery and flowers. The interplay of light and...
Category

20th Century American Impressionist Figurative Paintings

Materials

Oil

Woman sitting in the garden oil on canvas painting
By Juan Soler
Located in Barcelona, Barcelona
Canvas measures 61x50 cm. Frameless He was born in 1951. Under the direction of the master Pedro Bermejo, he began his artistic career, quickly highlighting and observing in his works an unusual mastery of drawing. A very mature painter who has known how to stop time in all his works. His themes are preferably costumbristas although in his work the usual thing is to see eight century themes, with horse carriages, hats, umbrellas and still lifes. Observing his work reminds us, by the subject, of Maestro...
Category

1980s Post-Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Beautiful French Impressionist Oil Lady Reading in Flower Garden
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Artist/ School: French School, 20th century Title: Lady reading in garden, beautiful French Impressionist work Medium: oil painting on canvas, unframed ...
Category

20th Century Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil

Woman in the Garden
By Stuart Travis
Located in Fort Washington, PA
Date: 1907-1910 Medium: Pastel on Board Dimensions: 22.00" x 28.00" Signature: Signed Lower Right Stuart Travis did many early Vogue magazine covers. Signed with an address on ...
Category

1910s Portrait Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Board

Lady in the Garden by the Bay
By Arne Kavli
Located in Saratoga Springs, NY
Signed lower left Arne Kavli was born 27 May, 1878 in Bergen, and received his first restricted initiation into the world of artistic expression at the Tec...
Category

Early 20th Century Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas

"In the Brush" Mid Century Oil Painting of Figures & Flowers Landscape
Located in New York, NY
A modernist depiction of figures in a landscape with a woman balancing a basket top her head. This native oil painting is reminiscent of post impressionistic artist Henri Rousseau. With colors of cobalts...
Category

1950s Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas