A Sawmill in the Woods
by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919)23⅛ x 40 inches
Signed lower right: Blakelock
Information
Provenance
The artist
Private collection, New York
Private collection, Florida, by descent from above
Babcock Galleries, New York, New York, 1996
Private collection, Minnesota, 1997
Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York, New York
Exhibited
Babcock Galleries, New York, New York, From the Light of Distant Skies, A Selection of 19th Century American Paintings, April 8–August 11, 2010, no. 41
Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York, New York, Refuge and Remembrance: Landscape Painting in the Civil War Era, May 16–June 22, 2013
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Great Mad Genius Returns, November 11–December 10, 2016
Literature
Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Great Mad Genius Returns (New York: Questroyal Fine Art, 2016), plate 21.
Artist Biography
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in the backwoods of Upstate New York, he languished in a mental institution as his paintings began to break American records. So great was his fame that at an auction in the Plaza Hotel ballroom the total realized for his paintings exceeded the totals for the Monets, the Rembrandts, the Renoirs, the Pissarros, and the Botticellis.
Forever true to his own vision, he lived in abject poverty in the years before he was institutionalized, and even then he never ceased painting, pulling out his own hair for brush bristles and using tobacco juice to augment the meager
