Elmer Boyd Smith (Canadian American, 1860-1943), The Harvest at Auvers-sur-Oise

Lot Details & Additional Photographs

Oil on canvas, 1894, signed and inscribed at lower left, unframed.

Stretcher size 38 1/4 x 51 1/2 in.

Sotheby's Paris, Tableaux Dessins Sculptures 1300-1900, Session II, June 15, 2024, Lot 236
Acquired from the above

The American Elmer Boyd Smith is best-known today for his prolific and inventive career as an illustrator of children’s books. But he was first of all one of those American artists who flocked to Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, seeking to round off their artistic training.

Boyd Smith moved to the French capital in the early 1880s, and was taught by Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre at the Académie Julian. After leaving the school in 1884, he remained in France, travelling, painting and writing.

The works he produced at this time express a naturalism derived from Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton, those famous chroniclers of rural and peasant life. Painted in 1894, barely four years after the death of Van Gogh in this same countryside around Auvers, The Harvest at Auvers-sur-Oise is directly inspired by Millet and Breton, but the execution is more modern and luminous, influenced by impressionism.

Light surface grime.