Morning Glory
by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919)16 3/16 x 24⅛ inches
Signed lower right: R.A. Blakelock
Information
Provenance
J. B. Weir
Reinhardt Gallery, New York, New York
Mrs. George W. Mixter
Mrs. Mason Partridge
LeRoy Ireland, 1951
Tullah and Thomas Edward Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania, 1952
Bernard Danenberg Galleries, New York, New York, by 1969 (as Morning Glow)
Maxwell Galleries, San Francisco, California, by 1973 (as Morning Glow)
Robert Rice Gallery, Houston, Texas (as Landscape)
Private collection, Houston, Texas
Exhibited
(Probably) Maxwell Galleries, San Francisco, California, American Painting: A Comprehensive Exhibition, February 23–April 7, 1973
Literature
One Hundred Recent Acquisitions by American Artists: Spring–Summer, 1969 (New York: Bernard Danenberg Galleries, 1969), 8, no. 11.
(Probably) American Painting: A Comprehensive Exhibition (San Francisco: Maxwell Galleries, 1973), 33.
Note: This painting has been authenticated and catalogued by the University of Nebraska Inventory as NBI-173.
George Weber Mixter (1876–1947) was a major and then colonel with the U.S. Army Air Service, as well as a businessman in New York and Philadelphia.
LeRoy Ireland (1889–1970) was an art dealer and artist who conducted the research for the 1965 catalogue raisonné of George Inness (1825–1894).
Thomas Edward Hanley (1893–1969) had a notable collection of books and seventeenth through twentieth-century artwork, including some of the most celebrated European masters as well as American painters like Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and Theodore Robinson (1852–1896). Tullah Hanley (d. 1992) was an active arts patron and philanthropist.
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