EDWARD M. BANNISTER (1828 - 1901)
Untitled (Docks at Dusk).

Oil on thin wood panel, circa late 1870s. 191x254 mm; 7½x10 inches. Signed in pencil, left edge verso.

Provenance: Frank Tolles Chamberlin, thence by descent, private collection, California and New Mexico; private collection, New Mexico (2022).

Frank Tolles Chamberlin (1873 - 1961) was a landscape painter, and sculptor who lived and worked in California. His wife was Catherine Beecher Stetson, the only daughter of Rhode Island painter Charles Walter Stetson, a close friend and colleague of Bannister's. Stetson and Bannister were part of a small group of artists who founded the Providence Art Club in 1880.

After establishing his early career in painting in Boston, where he studied at the Lowell Institute, in 1871 Bannister and his wife Christina Chareteaux moved to Providence. Bannister became one of Providence's leading painters and a respected figure in the artistic community. He focused on landscape painting and won the first prize bronze medal in painting at the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia with Under the Oaks in 1876. He also was one of the original board members of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878.

This oil sketch is a wonderful scene of moored ships in what appears to be the harbor of 1870s Providence - the buildings and smoke stacks looming in the backgound are similar to contemporaneous images. Bannister would paint such small plein air studies on board, sometimes to develop into larger paintings in the studio. A similiar docks scene is found in his oil painting, Providence River (1881). This exciting discovery is one of the earliest Bannister paintings to come to auction.

Thank you to Anne Louise Avery, art historian and Edward Bannister expert, for her review of this painting. It is to be included in Avery's forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist.