Eleanor Hancock Pryor (1872-1966)

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Americana: Furniture, Decorative Art & Folk A...

By Cowan's Auctions

Mar 19, 2020

Set Reminder 2020-03-19 10:00:00 2020-03-19 10:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Americana: Furniture, Decorative Art & Folk Art https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/cowans/americana-furniture-decorative-art-folk-art-5004
Cowan's Americana: Furniture, Decorative Art & Folk Art auction will feature two sessions: the first session on Thursday, March 19 includes over 350 lots of furniture, paintings, folk art, textiles, early lighting, metalwork, advertising, coin-operated machines, vintage automobiles and more. Cowan's Auctions dawnie@cowans.com

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• Lot Description
  Portrait of Guitarist, Likely Kentucky Country Musician Billy Osborne
  
  circa late 1940s
  
  oil on canvas
  
  signed Pryor on reverse
  
  34 x 29.75 inches. 
  
  Eleanor Hancock Pryor (1872-1966) became a central figure in the Lexington, Kentucky arts scene of the 1920s and 30s at a relatively late age. She did not begin her formal studies in art until after the first world war when she enrolled at the University of Kentucky. During the early 20s she also worked with various visiting artists, notably Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer in Lexington, 1921 and Sudduth Goff in Louisville and Lexington 1923-1925. Both of those painters worked in a clear, realistic style enlivened by bold color and compositional formats drawn from the teachings of Art Students League masters George Bridgman and Kenneth Hayes Miller. On an extended visit to Paris in 1927 she enrolled at the Academie Colarossi, that lingering vestige of the French beaux-arts style, and made copies of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Raphael’s Holy Family. When she returned to Lexington she staged a retrospective of her work at the Phoenix Hotel, attracting much local attention. Writing for the Lexington Herald, Justina Smith praised the copies and her abilities as a portrait painter who “sees clearly, and has a flexible brush, guided by a steady eye…” (February 17, 1928).
  
  In 1929 she and her husband Dr. Joseph Pryor built a house at 417 West Second Street, Lexington, whose most unusual feature was a large studio room which extended the length of the second floor. For the next fifteen years she used that space as a staging ground for portrait sittings, exhibitions and meetings of arts groups. Much in demand as a portraitist, she painted many prominent figures in the financial and social worlds, including bankers Tevis Wilkerson and George Bain, and historic preservationist Julia Spencer Ardery. She also painted a powerful portrait of boxer Gene Tunney, taken from a photograph, which captures the taunt expression of his muscular physique. Then, in the early 1950s, as her husband’s health began to fail she faded from the art scene, and after her death in 1966 much of her art work disappeared.
  
  The painting at hand opens an intriguing discourse. Sold at auction as A Rockabilly Guitarist in 2014, it is executed in a style which departs from Pryor’s usual academic realism. By setting the subject against a red unfigured background, and characterized by a distracted gaze, she creates a mood of disengagement, compatible with modernist notions of the artist as an existential outsider. Photographs of her studio in Pryor papers at the University of Kentucky Library suggest this work was done there amidst the various props she kept on hand.
  
  Two aspects of this portrait provoke revisionist thoughts on subject and title. “Rockabilly” is a form of rock and roll music with a country twang, which became popular in the 1950s, long after Pryor’s retirement from the creative world. Light on previous speculation that the subject is Kentuckian Billy Adams has been dimmed by photographs of the rather beefy Adams whose dark hair bears little resemblance to this subject. A more likely candidate is Kentucky native Jimmie Osborne.
  
  Osborne was born in Winchester, Kentucky and began to perform country music at an early age. After winning first prize in a local talent contest in 1940 he was given a contract at WLAP, Lexington, a radio station then launching a full program of country music. Osborne’s popularity there led to a contract with the nationally famous Louisiana Hayride, but he returned to Lexington in 1946, soon becoming the most popular disc jockey on WLEX during the early 1950s. This portrait resembles the young Osborne and the commission to paint him could have come from WLEX investor Turner C. Rush whose boardroom portrait Pryor painted. Depressed and troubled by marital issues and declining popularity, Osborne took his own life in 1957.
  
  Eleanor Hancock Pryor is yet another woman artist whose life and work are returning to attention. Her work is part of the Morris Museum of Art collection of Southern Art, Augusta, Georgia, and she is on the roster of documented women artists kept by the Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Her work rarely appears on the market. As a document of her growth as an artist this unusual painting inspires renewed attention, even as subject’s musical instrument prompts an interest in the cultural history of Kentucky.
  
  Estill Curtis Pennington

  Condition

  minor paint loss center left. 
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