Property from a Private Collection, Waycross, GA

Description:

Molly Luce (RI, 1896 - 1986), Beach with Birds, Little Compton, Oil on Canvas Stretched on Board, c. 1945, signed lower right, and inscribed in mailbox 'Luce 45', depicting a shoreline with geese and mailbox in the foreground under a gray sky, in a wood frame. Frame size: 23 5/8 in. x 27 1/2 in.

Molly Luce was born Marian Clark Luce in Pittsburgh in 1896. She grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in Plainfield and Glen Ridge, New Jersey and spent her summers in Kingsville, Ohio with her grandparents. Luce studied art at Wheaton College under Amy Otis, graduating with an associated degree in 1916. She than continued her studies at the Art Students League of New York, under F. Luis Mora, George Bellows, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1924 Luce exhibited her work at the Whitney Studio Club and continued to show her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the annual and biennial exhibitions up to 1950. She was also included in the Whitney Traveling Exhibition of 1925 and 1926. Luce moved to Minneapolis in 1925 and the following year she married conservator and art historian Alan Burroughs of the Fogg Art Museum and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1966 twenty of her paintings were exhibited in a one-woman show celebrating the 50th anniversary of the graduation of Wheaton's class of 1916. Today Luce's work can be found in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others. Her painting 'Pennsylvania Coal Country' was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987.

Measurements: Height: by sight 19 1/4 in. x Width: 23 3/8 in.

Condition:

Good conidian, some craquelure, slight waviness to canvas in lower left corner, in need of cleaning, wear to edges of frame.