"The First Presbyterian Church On 5th Ave". Oil on canvas 18 1/2 x 15 1/2 in., 22 1/4 x 19 1/4 in. (framed). Hildegard Hume Hamilton was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1898. After her education there, and brief training at the age of six in art schools in Venice, Italy, while on a European sojourn with her father, she studied fine art at the Académie Julian, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Grande Chaumière in Paris, France, during the 1920s and 1930s. After returning to the United States, Mrs. Hamilton studied at the Art Students League, New York, New York, and the Cincinnati Art Academy, Cincinnati, Ohio.Hamilton exhibited her topographical street-scenes and landscapes widely throughout the United States with shows at the Syracuse, New York, Museum of Fine Art; the University of Kentucky; the University of Georgia, and most importantly, New York City’s Society of Independent Artists from 1929 to 1933, 1938, 1939, 1943 and 1944. Hamilton’s paintings are included in the collections of Wesleyan College, Virginia Military Institute, the University of Georgia, and Hanover College.Hamilton discovered Florida sometime after 1936, the date of her first Florida painting. And while she traveled extensively after 1933, with recorded residencies in Tangiers, Tokyo, Nassau, Malta, Sicily, Portugal, England, France, Spain, and throughout South America and Mexico, she called Ft. Lauderdale her permanent home after 1948. There, she continued to paint both European views gleaned from her notebooks and photo albums, as well as scenes of Florida including plein air views of the Tarpon River and Himmarshe Canal near Ft. Lauderdale. Hildegarde Hamilton died in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in January of 1970, at the age of 72.Hamilton’s “Key West” is an important work from the 1940s and is recorded in her Society of Independent Artists exhibition of 1944.The painting is now in the Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum at the Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida.Here Hamilton presents the viewer with a topographical view of a known historic house in old Key West, Florida. In the foreground, a single figure dressed in blue sells brightly colored flowers and vegetables from a wooden handcart. Below the figure a strong white horizontal band of crushed coquina roadway anchors the oil on canvas while it establishes a foundation for the diagonal architecture of the white classical house which solidly occupies the left mid-ground of the painting. The elegant two-storied house, with its double colonnaded porches of five columns each, leads the viewer to the stairway which unites the two figures in a strong vertical mass which functions as the center of the composition. At the right base of the stairway, a single female figure in a dark red dress tends small patch of garden in the flower and vine-filled yard of the imposing white house. Beyond, two dark wooden houses with rusty tin roofs complete the diagonal axis of the architecture. Barely visible on the viewer’s right are a gray fence and brown wall of an adjoining structure. Overhead a bright cloud-filled sky completes the dynamic Impressionist light-filled composition.Widely known as a colorist, Hamilton’s loose and suggestive brush stroke creates an important moment in the everyday domestic life of Key West, Florida. In this way, Hamilton unites the fascination with everyday mundane existence and rough brushstrokes championed by the Ash Can School of American modernists with the soft-focus and gestural brushstroke and dramatic use of color by late American Impressionists. Submitted by Gary R. Libby, author, curator and art historianWriting on the back.

Good condition