Questroyal 2009

Guy Carleton Wiggins ( 1883 – 1962 ) Plate 43 Union Square,Winter Oil on canvas 25 3 / 8 x 30 1 / 4 inches Signed and inscribed lower left: GuyWiggins. NA .; signed and titled on verso: union square, winter . GuyWiggins NA provenance Private collection, Dallas [Wiggins] notes the various moods of times and seasons with a scrupulous attention, and occasionally weaves his garnered facts into a composition that is both poetry and truth. The NewYork Times, 1912 1 The work of GuyWiggins is full of the essential qualities of personality and sincerity. His pictures are his own, seen and felt by his own eyes, his own heart. Campanile Galleries, 1970 2 Popularity Contest Guy CarletonWiggins had a career most would dreamof. In 1912 , his painting Metropolitan Tower was accepted by the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, mak- ing him the youngest artist to be represented in its permanent collection. 3 His land- and cityscapes were so famous, in fact, that when given the chance to choose among a group of eighty-seven paintings by contemporary artists in a 1940 Grand Central Art Galleries raffle, W. S. Oberfelder of Chicago (president of theWalter Field Company) confidently pickedWiggins’s Fifth Avenue, Winter . 4 Scenes such as the one selected by Oberfelder were un- doubtedly Wiggins’s most popular works. To capture the liveliness and “motion in the crowd” noted of these cityscapes, Wiggins would typically set up a studio in the home or office of one of his friends, whether in a Manhattan office or skyscraper on John Street. 5 Union Square,Winter was likely painted in one of these “makeshift” studios on the west side of the square; this supposition is based on the canvas’s inclusion of the Union Square Savings Bank, a neoclassical building complete with four Corinthian columns, on the right. — jlw Wiggins’s works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Florence Griswold Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Richmond Art Museum, and Dallas Museum of Art. 1 “News and Notes of the Art World,” The NewYork Times , February 4, 1912 . 2 Guy C.Wiggins ( 1883 – 1962 ) American Impressionist , exh. cat. (Chicago: Campanile Galleries, 1970 ), n. p. 3 David B. Dearinger, “Guy CarletonWiggins,” inWilliam H. Gerdts, Masterworks of American Impressionism from the Pfeil Collection (Alexandria, Va.: Art Services International, 1992 ), p. 275 . 4 “Chicago ManWins First Art Choice,” The NewYork Times , November 8, 1940. 5 Guy C.Wiggins ( 1883 – 1962 ) American Impressionist , n. p.