Will Henry Stevens (American, 1881-1949), Untitled #1363

Pastel on paper, 1945, signed and dated at lower right, matted in a giltwood frame below glass.


Sheet sight 15 3/4 x 13 1/2 in.; Frame dimensions 26 1/4 x 24 in.

Being Sold to Benefit Charitable Purposes in Eastern North Carolina

Will Henry Stevens was a versatile American modernist whose career bridged realism, abstraction, and a deep reverence for the natural world. He enrolled at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1901, studying under Frank Duveneck and Lewis Henry Meakin, and in 1904 won a design competition sponsored by Cincinnati’s Rookwood Pottery, where he was hired as a tile designer. By 1906, Stevens had moved to New York to study at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase, forging important associations with Van Dearing Perrine and Jonas Lie. His first solo exhibition followed at the New Gallery in 1907. Throughout his career, Stevens worked across media and styles, creating both representational landscapes and innovative abstractions influenced by Emerson, Thoreau, Chinese Sung dynasty paintings and modernist pioneers such as Kandinsky and Klee.

In 1921, Stevens joined the faculty of Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, a position he held until 1948. While he painted the Louisiana landscape during the academic year, his summers were spent in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, where the natural environment inspired many of his most lyrical works. Stevens was an active and well-regarded teacher at Southern art colonies, particularly around Asheville. In 1944, Stevens exhibited work at Black Mountain College where Josef Albers praised his “sensitive musicality for color.” Today, Stevens’s works are represented in major collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, affirming his place as a key figure in American modernism and Southern regional art.

Soft cockling and even toning to the sheet, not examined outside the frame.