Provenance

Stephen Carlton Clark

American, 1882 - 1960

Explore Selected Works

We look slightly down onto a nearly nude woman with pale pink skin, who sits facing away from us as she lifts her hands to her dark hair in this vertical painting. The scene is painted with broad, visible strokes, and some details are difficult to make out. The woman's torso and head almost fill the vertical height of the painting. The scene is loosely painted so some details are indistinct, but she seems to face a mirror above the small table of a vanity. Visible brushstrokes in tones of pale peach and pink, taupe, and faint sage green capture her spine, shoulder blades, the muscles of her arms, and the dimple above her round buttocks. She uses both hands to pin up her chestnut-brown hair above a rectangular clip painted in muted gold with touches of light pink. She sits sideways in a wooden chair so the ladder-back is to our right. Her thighs are wrapped in a fluffy white piece of cloth, perhaps a towel, which may be wrapped with a ruby-red cloth or it could be a red cushion beneath. The surface of the narrow tabletop in front of her, to our left, is painted with areas of sage green, elephant gray, and royal blue. About a dozen orbs in coral orange and fuchsia pink above and around a band of canary yellow suggest flowers in a yellow vase along the left side of the table. The mirror above the vanity has a wide, gold frame. The woman’s reflection is painted with long strokes of ash brown with a few touches of rose pink. Though abstracted, the reflection seems to capture her torso and one bent elbow. The wall to our left of the vanity is pale pea green and to our right, dark brown. Streaks of honey-brown against a black field in the lower right corner suggests an area rug on an otherwise peanut-brown floor. The artist signed the work in marine blue in the lower left corner, “Henri Matisse.”
Henri Matisse, La coiffure, 1901, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.165

La coiffure

Henri Matisse · 1901 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1963.10.165

Thomas Eakins, Archbishop Diomede Falconio, 1905, oil on canvas, Gift of Stephen C. Clark, 1946.16.1

Archbishop Diomede Falconio

Thomas Eakins · 1905 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1946.16.1

A young man with a peachy, ruddy complexion lies on his stomach in a wooden rowboat on a river, reaching forward to grasp the horn of a stag almost completely submerged in the rippling water with one hand. On the opposite riverbank, gold, rust, and scarlet-red trees span the width of this horizontal painting. The boy’s arms straddle the stern of the boat so one holds the antler with his right hand, closer to us, while the other clutches a rope with a loop at the end. He turns his face, mouth agape and cheeks flushed, over his right shoulder to look to our left, at a dog swimming toward the boat. The dog has white and caramel-brown markings, with dark brown ears. The boy wears earth-brown clothing and the front of his wide-brimmed hat is pushed up to reveal dark eyes and sable-brown bangs and brows. The stag and dog are between us and the boat, and are surrounded by thick brushstrokes of parchment white to create ripples in the forest-green water. Only the open muzzle, part of the eye, and the tips of the stag’s antlers are above the water’s surface. To our right, a bare, fallen tree lies along the far riverbank parallel to the boat. The boat and water fill the lower half of the scene and the autumn trees fill the upper half. The artist has signed and dated the painting in the lower right, “Winslow Homer 1892.”
Winslow Homer, Hound and Hunter, 1892, oil on canvas, Gift of Stephen C. Clark, 1947.11.1

Hound and Hunter

Winslow Homer · 1892 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1947.11.1

Henry Golden Dearth, Flecks of Foam, c. 1911/1912, oil on wood, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.120

Flecks of Foam

Henry Golden Dearth · c. 1911/1912 · oil on wood ·  Accession ID  1963.10.120

Bibliography

1959

  • Winchester, Alice. "The man behind the Association." Antiques (February 1959): 170.

1960

  • "Stephen C. Clark, Art Patron, Dead." The New York Times. 18 September 1960 [obituary].