HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999)
Bather.

Oil on masonite board, 1954. 262x362 mm; 10⅜x14¼ inches. Incised signature and date in oil, lower left.

Provenance: gift of the artist to Cornelia Foulkrad (the model for the bather), Detroit, MI; Seth Taffae Fine Art, New York; private collection.

Illustrated: Leslie King-Hammond, "Hughie Lee-Smith," Pomegranate Press, California, 2010, plate 27; p. 48.

Hughie Lee-Smith's painting, Bather, is an intimate shoreline scene of three figures at a lake-side beach. Lee-Smith's composition, with its diagonal alignment and uniform spatial alignment of the figures, gives a broad sense of depth perception. In her 2010 monograph, Dr. Leslie King-Hammond writes, "Bather is stunning in the simplicity of its spacious, airy landscape, yet startling in the brevity of a single gesture; why is the subject hiding her face?" King-Hammond p. 46.