Quarry

c. 1939/1940

Edward L. Loper

Painter, American, 1916 - 2011

A stream winds through steep, rocky banks that lead back to a complex of buildings under a swirling sky in this nearly square landscape painting. The scene is painted with loose and visible brushstrokes in shades of earthy and wheat brown, tan, forest green, silvery gray, and slate blue. A steep hillock in the lower left corner of the canvas is covered with tall grasses. A barren tree with spiky branches reaches into the sky beyond the hillock. The land dips in front of us, across the right two-thirds of the composition. Just beyond this, the land slopes steeply down to the river tucked into the rocky, canyon-like riverbed. Three people, painted with a few strokes of beige and gray and minuscule in scale, are on boulders near the water about halfway back. Some of the rocky cliff faces are carpeted with green grass and some are bare dirt. A complex of buildings beyond a chain link fence are painted with shades of steel gray, rust red, and dark brown. A celestial-blue water tower stands to the left of center on the horizon, which comes two-thirds of the way up this composition. Some brick-red streaks in the distance to the left are difficult to make out, but might be another structure. A few streaks of white sunlight pour down through breaks in the swirling dark gray clouds in the sky above. A few glimpses of blue sky are visible near the top center of the composition.
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On View

East Building Ground Level, Gallery 106-B


Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Possibly purchased 1947 by the International Business Machines Corporation (I.B.M.).[1] Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. [1952-1997], Washington; gift 1996 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2015 by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] The I.B.M. Fine Arts Department purchased thirty-two paintings, prints, and sculptures from the exhibition The Negro Artist Comes of Age: A National Survey of Contemporary American Artists, Albany Institute of History and Art, New York, 1945. It is uncertain whether the NGA work appeared in the exhibition; the accompanying exhibition catalogue includes three works by Loper, but none of them match the dimensions of the work now in the NGA. However, a letter of 16 May 1997 from Jenine Culligan of the Delaware Art Museum to Linda Simmons, curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, states that Quarry was indeed one of the three Loper paintings purchased by I.B.M. from the exhibition; in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Inscriptions

upper left reverse: Edward L. Loper

Wikidata ID

Q46635226


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