This portrait of a precocious young boy is significant for two reason: the subject is Eero Saarinen, the famed designer of tulip chairs and architect best known for designing the Washington Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., the TWA Flight Center in New York City, and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, and the painter is his father Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect who designed the Helsinki Central railway station, the National Museum of Finland, the Vyborg railway station, the Hvitträsk, and the Kleinhans Music Hall in Finland and the famous Cranbrook Academy campus, where he would then go on to teach at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and become its president in 1932. It's provenance is Eero Saarinen's own son, the award-winning cinematographer Eric Saarinen. The painting is Painting is 23.25 x 16.25.
Eliel Saarinen was born in 1873 in Rantasalmi, Finland. was educated in Helsinki at the Helsinki University of Technology. From 1896 to 1905 he worked as a partner with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren at the firm Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen. His first major work was showcased at the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 World Fair in Paris. His early style was known as Finnish National Romanticism. After moving to the United States he designed the Gulf Building in Houston and became a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. In 1925 he was requested to design the Cranbrook campus. His work has been exhibited in many prestigious places, such as his iconic tea urn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the St. Louis Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, the British Museum in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The touring exhibition Modernism in American Silver: 20th-Century Design, organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, which also traveled to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art also hold tea urn-related Eliel Saarinen designs.
Eero Saarinen was born in 1910. He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and took courses in sculpture and furniture design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He had a close relationship with fellow students Charles and Ray Eames, and became good friends with Florence Knoll (née Schust). He began his studies in sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France, in September 1929. He then went on to study at the Yale School of Architecture, completing his studies in 1934. In 1940 he designed his famous Tulip chairs and in 1948 he designed what would be his most well-known sculpture, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. His Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois would also achieve international acclaim while the first major work by Saarinen, in collaboration with his father, was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, which follows the rationalist design Miesian style, incorporating steel and glass but with the addition of accent of panels in two shades of blue.
After his father's death in July 1950, Saarinen founded his own architect's office, Eero Saarinen and Associates. He was the principal partner from 1950 until his death. The firm carried out many of its most important works, including the
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