Duo
Framed: 24 3/4 x 21 inches (62.87 x 53.34 cm)
- 129
A Superb Exhibition, Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, May 1-May 30, 1949, unnumbered.
Modern French Masters: a Distinguished Group of Paintings from the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries of Los Angeles, Barbizon-Plaza Art Galleries, New York, November 1-30, 1949, unnumbered.
Two clowns, outlined heavily in black, face one another. One wears a costume of intense red, while the other is dressed in harlequin colors.
Georges Rouault was a deeply spiritual man. His compassion for social outcasts and human suffering can be felt in his paintings, many of which have overtly religious subjects. As a young man, the artist was apprenticed to a stained glass painter. His choice of rich colors and black contours may be a reference to church windows and their sacred scenes.
Purchased from the artist by Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), May 2, 1937 [1];
With Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, CA, by May 1, 1949-1950 [2];
Purchased from Dalzell Hatfield by the Friends of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1950;
Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1950.
NOTES:
[1] According to Gilles Rouault, Fondation Georges Rouault, in an email to MacKenzie Mallon, Specialist, Provenance, March 16, 2016, this painting appears as no. 77 on a receipt for 102 completed works delivered by Rouault to Vollard on May 2, 1937.
[2] This painting was included in the exhibition A Superb Exhibition, Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, May 1-May 30, 1949.
Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, A Superb Exhibition, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, 1949), unpaginated, (repro.).
Barbizon-Plaza Art Galleries, Modern French Masters: a Distinguished Group of Paintings from the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries of Los Angeles, exh. cat. (New York: Barbizon-Plaza Art Galleries, 1949), unpaginated, (repro.).
Pierre Courthion, Rouault (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1962), 430, 465, (repro.).
Bernard Dorival and Isabelle Rouault, Rouault: L’oeuvre peint (Monaco: Éditions André Sauret, 1988), (repro.).
