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Margaret Fitzhugh Browne (1884-1972). Before the Fight browse these categories for related items... All Items: Fine Art:Paintings:Oil:N. America:American: Pre 1940: item # 976278 Please refer to our stock # 2468 when inquiring.
Raymond Agler Fine Arts 16 Pleasant Street Gloucester, Massachusetts 01930 978-281-5048 Guest Book $9,700 |
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| Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches plus frame, signed and dated 1935 lower left and titled verso. In 1935 Joe Louis fought 13 professional bouts. In June, he knocked out Primo Carnera and in September he KO'd Max Baer in 4 rounds. The following month, Margaret Fitzhugh Browne spied Ray Curley entering Fenway Studios in Boston. Curley, a professional wrestler, supplemented his income by posing for Boston artists. Browne's diary for Nov. 5, 1935 notes: "...went upstairs. My colored Prize Fighter was there. Got my set-up and model posed. It will be called 'Before the Fight' and he is shown in his dressing room with boxing gloves on before a whitewashed wall...I am keen about it and think it will make a corking picture." Browne, a proper Bostonian with a summer studio in Annisquam on Cape Ann, was by then a nationally-recognized portrait painter (Henry Ford, Bobby Jones, King Alfonso XIII of Spain) and author of a book on the subject, "Portrait Painting" (1933). Her "Blesse de Guerre" (War Wounded) painted the same year, was included in Erica Hirshler's landmark Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition and book, "A Studio of Her Own", 2001. That work portrays a blinded WWI veteran with his little dog on his lap (actually a sighted Gloucester neighbor, the diary reveals.) Both paintings treated then highly unusual subjects for a female painter. Browne's love of the staged scene found perfect expression in her annual "Wax Works", the tableau vivants that she produced every summer for 25 years at the Annisquam Sea Fair (which continues to the present, and was the subject of an article in the "New Yorker.") She had an uncanny talent for identifying facial similarities of the famous or infamous in the looks and manners of her neighbors--who were then recruited to pose as wax figures, the subjects ranging from Marat (with a gob of ketchup on his chest) in his bathtub, to Little Miss Muffet. It is likely that Browne chose Ray Curley to model for this painting as a tribute to the "Brown Bomber", not long after to become Heavyweight Champion. "Before the Fight" descended by gift from Browne to an artist friend and thence through his family. | ||
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