GEORGE RANDOLPH BARSE, JR.
Figure, Hand and Arm Studies.

Color pastels and charcoal on brown wove paper, 1935. 545x640 mm; 21½x25¼ inches. Signed, dated and dedicated in pencil, lower center recto.

Provenance: Private collection, New York.

Barse (1861-1938) was an American artist and illustrator born in Detroit and raised in Kansas City. During the late 1870s / early 1880s, he spent five years training in Paris at the Académie Julien under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. He returned to Europe in the late 1880s for several years and there married the Italian model Rosina Ferrara, muse of John Singer Sargent and others, in 1891. In 1895, Barse received his best-known commission, eight allegorical panels for the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and in 1900 became a full member of the National Academy of Design. From 1904 he was based in Katonah, New York, though he also taught at the Art Students League, New York. Barse's wife died from pneumonia in 1934, and the current work may be related to this tragic event. Barse committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning four years after his wife's death.