Charles Paul Gruppe (1860-1940), In the Harbor - Gloucester

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Jul 11, 2024

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• Lot Description
  Charles Paul Gruppe (1860-1940)
  In the Harbor - Gloucester, 1923
  signed "Chas P Gruppe" lower right
  oil on canvas, 35 by 43 in.
  in Newcomb-Macklin frame signed and titled on Art Institute of Chicago label on back
  
  Charles Gruppe, father of Emile, was born in Canada. After moving to Rochester, New York, when he was ten, Gruppe worked in a sign-painting shop before earning enough to send himself to Europe to study art. He settled in Katwyk Ann Zee, on the coast near Leiden, Holland. After success there, he returned to the US as the winds of World War I gathered in 1909, raising his family between Rochester and New York City. Gruppe was an active member of the Salmagundi Club and exhibited with the National Academy of Design, the Boston Art Club, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. In 1925, father and son traveled to Cape Ann together, and after this first trip often painted together in Gloucester and Rockport. After fifteen summers painting from his coastal studio, Gruppe died in Rockport in 1940.
  
  A label on the back of "In the Harbor" reads, “Mr. Gruppe selected this painting as the most important work he had available to send to the exhibition of paintings by American Artists and Sculptors which was held recently at the Art Institute of Chicago…
  
  “Inspiration for this work came to the artist last autumn when he made the last of a comprehensive series of Gloucester, America’s busiest fishing port. The charms of the water front of this picturesque harbor are well known to both American painters and art connoisseurs, and form valuable sketching ground to the former while they give much enjoyment to the latter.
  
  “The picture presents a beautiful harmony and well-balanced composition; a perfect color arrangement, true to the day’s mood. The subject illustrates a portion of the harbor shore, a pleasing group of boats, wharves and houses, made beautiful and restful by reason of the artist expressing the scene in a quiet moment of the day. Two sailing boats built upon graceful lines—fishing schooners with sails furled—are hove to near the end of a pier. Together they form the dominant note of the picture. Most interesting [...] reflections of these boats are cast in the calm water. Smaller boats and a boat house on the distant shore edge, and houses nestling amid trees, as the vista perspective disappears beyond the shore and over the hill, bear just the proper relation to the balance of the picture that these details should do, and are satisfying elements going to make up the pleasing ensemble of a good work of art of this kind.
  
  “‘In the Harbor’...lends grace and beauty to the environment, wherever hung, enriching and ennobling art gallery, museum, spacious living room or club lounge, bank counting room or commodious reception room.”
  
  Provenance: Private Collection, Wisconsin
  
  Exhibited: Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, “American Paintings and Sculpture, Thirty-Sixth Annual Exhibition," 1923.

  Condition

  Please email condition report requests to leah@copleyart.com. 
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