Lot 7
Mid-20th C. American Folk Painting - Boston Night Scene
Mid-20th C. American Folk Painting - Boston Night Scene
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Anonymous (American, active XX century). View of the Hotel Statler from Tremont Street in Boston. Oil on polychrome-decorated hardwood cabinet door panel, ca. 1955 to 1966 CE. Park Square, Boston, after midnight, and the city is doing exactly what cities do when respectable people have gone to bed: gleaming, humming, and refusing to dim. An anonymous American hand has memorialized this particular corner of mid-century Boston with the meticulous devotion of someone who walked these streets every day and wanted, above all, to get the signs right. The scene unfolds from a vantage point on Tremont Street, looking northwest toward Park Square from the vicinity of Casey's Market, the grocer's storefront legible at right in the painter's careful lettering as "T.J. Casey Market." It is the one landmark the painter did not need to seek out. He was already standing in front of it. Size of painting: 20.25" W x 25.5" H (51.4 cm x 64.8 cm); of frame: 22.75" W x 28" H (57.8 cm x 71.1 cm)
The view opens onto a deep cobalt sky. A full moon, rendered as a simple pale disc, presides over the rooftops with the indifference of an old Bostonian. Below it the landmark architecture of Park Square asserts itself with the quiet authority of civic permanence. At center, Ralph Harrington Doane's Motor Mart Garage (1927), winner of the Harleston Parker Medal for finest new building in Boston, anchors the composition, its stripped-classical facade rendered in flat, confident planes of near-black, the Shell sign glowing amber at street level like a solitary eye. Above the garage entrance, the painter has lettered "MOTOR MART GARAGE TEXACO" with the careful hand of someone for whom signage was not incidental but the entire subject. To its left, the slender tower of the Hotel Statler (opened 1927, the future Boston Park Plaza) punctuates the skyline, its upper stories catching faint warmth against the blue, still identified by the name its neighborhood never stopped using long after Hilton's 1957 rechristening. On the far left, a large red billboard proclaims "TIME OUT FOR DAWSON'S," advertising the beloved New Bedford, Massachusetts ale whose mid-century ubiquity on Boston's walls and rooftops made it as much a part of the cityscape as the brickwork behind it. Below the billboard, small storefronts including a hamburger stand assert the neighborhood's democratic commerce. At right, beside Casey's Market, the adjacent building carries the name "Jack Lane," an establishment whose precise identity awaits further documentary confirmation but whose place in the painter's geography is unambiguous.
The street itself is given over entirely to the choreography of mid-century traffic. American sedans of the late 1940s and 1950s cruise the broad dark plane of the roadway in rounded, fastback silhouettes. A solitary red coupe, handled with noticeably more painterly affection than its black companions, cuts a vivid diagonal across the lower third of the composition, the one object in the scene that seems genuinely in motion. A man on a bicycle navigates the periphery with admirable optimism. Pedestrians, a woman walking a small white dog among them, occupy their own unhurried orbits, rendered in the schematic shorthand of a practiced eye rather than a trained one.
The palette is built on a deep mahogany ground, the same warm brown visible on the reverse, where the salvaged cabinet door's original Victorian painted decoration of peeled persimmon and grape cluster remains intact beneath its ornamental brass corner mounts. The painter did not prime away his substrate but embraced its tonality, using the dark wood as shadow, building selectively upward into blues, reds, and the small bright accents of electric light. The result is a nocturne in the original sense: a scene not transcribed from direct observation but reconstructed from memory and affection, in the manner of every great folk painting of every great city.
This is a work of sustained attention and local pride, the record of a specific place at a specific moment, painted by someone who understood Park Square not as architecture but as neighborhood: the Statler's tower keeping its old name out of loyalty or stubbornness, the Motor Mart's commercial ambitions spelled out letter by letter, the Dawson's billboard catching the passing eye, and the red coupe going somewhere in a hurry, all of it held together under a moonlit Boston sky that, sixty years on, refuses to end.
Provenance: private Boulder, Colorado, USA Collection
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Item #
201350
- Condition: Very Good. A few nicks and minor signs of age. Otherwise painting is in very good overall condition with good pigments and clear imagery. Mounted in a custom frame with suspension wire on verso for display.
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