Provenance

Grace Hendrick Eustis Phillips

Eustis, Grace Hendrick
Phillips, Neil Mrs.

American, died 1966

Explore selected works

This is a painting of a group of elephants standing under a large tent in a horizontal line. The elephants are depicted in various shades of gray and brown, with wrinkled skin and elongated trunks. Some elephants have chains around their legs. The canvas tent is supported by blue poles, and the edges of the tent are visible, although not much can be seen beyond. The ground is painted with green and brown, suggesting patchy grass. In the bottom left corner, the head of a zebra is visible as it appears to graze inside a pen.
John Steuart Curry, Circus Elephants, 1932, oil on canvas, Gift of Admiral Neill Phillips in memory of Grace Hendrick Phillips, 1976.50.1

Circus Elephants

John Steuart Curry · 1932 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1976.50.1

We look down at and across a sun-soaked landscape with tile-roofed, white-stucco buildings and plowed fields in this horizontal painting. Slate-blue shadows cast by trees behind us shade a triangular, grassy outcropping in the lower left corner of the painting. The front edge of the outcropping faces away from us and is lined with gray boulders, perhaps a retaining wall. The land must dip steeply down beyond the boulders, for we look down onto the canopies of the trees lining the wall and the houses tucked up against the ridge. A few white birds fly among the terracotta-red roofs below us. Green fields roll back to more structures near a tree line to our left. The horizon comes about three-quarters of the way up the composition, and a few thin clouds skim across the sliver of opal-blue sky above. A peach-colored full moon rises low on the horizon in the left center of the sky. Visible dabs of paint and brushstrokes mimic the stucco on the buildings, the texture of the leaves, and the sweeping fields. The artist signed the painting with black paint in the lower left corner: “W. L. METCALF.”
Willard Leroy Metcalf, Midsummer Twilight, c. 1890, oil on canvas, Gift of Admiral Neill Phillips in memory of Grace Hendrick Phillips, 1976.50.2

Midsummer Twilight

Willard Leroy Metcalf · c. 1890 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1976.50.2