Lady with a fur stole 1929

¾ Portrait sitting, looking to the left into the distance. The short hair is brown and wavy, the eyes gray-blue. The sitter holds her hands in her lap, fingers intertwined. She wears a beige, sleeveless, wide-cut silk dress, over it a light brown coat, over it a dark brown fur stole. The sitter is not wearing any jewelry. Background painted mainly in brown tones suggesting a stylized landscape and a cloudy sky.

JQAW# P_1929_080
Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm
Signature: John Quincy Ɑdams 29
Unknown private collection, Switzerland?
Image: Auktionshaus Zofingen, Switzerland.

Unknown in the Adams literature, directories and archives until 2017, this work is known only from an auction in Switzerland. As is almost always the case with auction works, no information is available on the sitter, but the sitter is presumed to be from the Viennese upper middle class or aristocratic circles, and possibly to have emigrated to Switzerland, where the painting was sold to the art trade by her heirs and brought to auction by them. Although Adams also spent some time in the U.S. in 1929 and also made portraits there, a person of U.S. origin for the representational portrait is considered rather unlikely.

Stylistically, the portrait is a typical late work by the artist with consistent application of the tone-on-tone principle, in this case brown tones, and a particularly expressionistic brushwork, which together account for the portrait's special quality.

Cross-references

Exhibited

Literature

Provenance

Unknown.
Art trade Switzerland.
Auction Zofingen 17.6.2017 Lot#1792.
Unknown private collection, Switzerland?