Oil on canvas board, monogrammed to lower right, presented in a wood frame with linen liner.

Panel size 12 x 16 in.; Frame dimensions 14 5/8 x 18 5/8 in.

From the Collection the late Hal and Frances Hancock, Sanford, North Carolina

Purchased in the early 1970s by the Hancocks from Clementine Hunter, Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana

A digital file of a photograph showing Frances Hancock with Clementine Hunter, and of Clementine holding this painting in 1975, will be available for the bidder. The family is keeping the original photographs.

Clementine Hunter is one of America's most important self-taught artists. She was born into a Louisianan Creole family at Hidden Hill plantation. At the age of 15, she moved up the Cane River to Melrose plantation. Hunter first worked long days in the cotton fields or picking pecans before becoming a domestic worker for the owner, Cammie Henry. In the 1920s, Henry began cultivating her property as an artists' colony, hosting such luminaries as William Faulkner and Richard Avedon.

Clementine Hunter completed her first painting in her 50s. Using paints left behind by Alberta Kinsey, a New Orleans artist, Hunter painted a baptismal scene on a discarded window shade. Thousands of paintings followed over the next fifty years.

Clementine Hunter was the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Delgado Museum, now known as the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2018, an exhibition of Hunter's work was mounted at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Louvre and the Los Angeles Museum of Art and are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Good estate condition; with some light stable craquelure to red painted areas.

$2,000 - 4,000