The Letter
by James Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917)20 x 16 inches
Signed lower right: CARROLL BECKWITH.
Information
Provenance
Bernard Black Gallery, New York, New York
Private collection, New York, New York, acquired from above, 1965
Private collection, Westlake Village, California, by descent from above
Literature
Gallery’s Image (New York: Bernard Black Gallery, 1965), 7.
Related Works
Grandmother’s Love Letters, ca. 1895, oil on canvas, 50½ x 34¼ inches, signed upper right: Carroll Beckwith; Private collection, as reproduced in Pepi Marchetti Franchi, Intimate Revelations: The Art of Carroll Beckwith (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1999), 110.
Mrs. Clifford Richardson Reading, late 1880s, oil on canvas, 15¾ x 11½ inches, signed lower right: J. Carroll Beckwith; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Artist Biography
James Carroll Beckwith enjoyed enormous success as a landscape, portrait, and genre painter in the late nineteenth century. Beckwith trained at the National Academy of Design before joining the atelier of Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, the famous French portraitist, in Paris. It was there that Beckwith developed his graceful, impressionist style. Beckwith’s work also bares the influence of his lifelong friend John Singer Sargent, with whom he shared a Paris studio. Beckwith and Sargent assisted Carolus-Duran in painting a ceiling mural in the Louvre in 1877, and Beckwith went on to win prizes at the Paris Salon, medals at the Paris