Neal Auction Louisiana Purchase 2015

48 217. Marie Atkinson Hull (American/Mississippi, 1890‑1980) , “Flamingos”, watercolor and graphite on illustration board, signed lower left, 20 in. x 16 in., original frame. $8000/12000 Provenance: Mississippi Collector. 218. Clarence Millet, A.N.A. (American/Louisiana, 1897‑1959) , “Morning in the Courtyard”, oil on canvas, signed lower right, signed and titled en verso, 26 in. x 22 in., framed. $15000/25000 219. Marie Atkinson Hull (American/Mississippi, 1890‑1980) , “Sharecropper”, c. 1935, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 30 in. x 25 in., framed. $50000/80000 Provenance: Mississippi Collector. Note: Noted Mississippi artist Marie Hull painted a series of portraits of sharecroppers and tenant farmers during the mid to late 1930s. These were the years of the Depression and her society portrait commissions in Jackson had ebbed. Within this series of portraits, Hull depicts several men whom she painted repeatedly. The work offered here depicts the same sitter as in Tenant Farmer , c. 1935, in the Roger Houston Ogden Collection in New Orleans. Hull shows the man sitting on a porch, wearing a blue shirt that matches his piercing blue eyes, his arms crossed in his lap. As Hull often does in this series of portraits, she prominently depicts the rural landscape and the farmer’s home in the background. With skill and sensitivity, Hull paints these men with empathy and respect while hiding nothing about the difficulty of their circumstances. Ref: Delehanty, Randolph, Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection , Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996. Levingston, Bruce, Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull , Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2015.