Albert Pike Lucas (Jersey City, 1862 - New York, 1945) - Woman in profile, 1893

Albert Pike Lucas
(Jersey City, 1862 - New York, 1945)
Woman in profile, 1893
Oil on canvas
41 x 33 cm
70 x 60.5 cm with frame
Signed 'A. P. Lucas' upper left, located and dated 'Paris 1893' upper right.

Provenance :
New York, private collection.


Born in New Jersey, Albert Pike spent some time at the Packer Institute in Brooklyn before choosing his artistic vocation and setting sail for Europe at the age of twenty. After several months' study in Belgium and Holland, he settled in Paris, where he entered the École des Beaux-arts in 1882. He first studied with Gustave Boulanger, then joined the studios of Ernest Hébert, Gustave Courtois and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, where he remained until 1888. A curious spirit, he also took up sculpture, receiving lessons from Jean-Antoine Injalbert at the same school. From 1890 to 1901, he exhibited almost every year at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-arts, becoming an associate member in 1892. Combining precise, rigorous naturalistic drawing with decorative symbolism, his subjects were most often pretexts for depicting the female nude in the midst of nature, and thus met with critical success. In 1896, his large painting L'Appel, depicting three nude women in a landscape, won an award at the Salon du Champ de Mars (cat. no. 833), before winning another medal at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in 1901. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle, he surprisingly exhibited a bust, Sambo, in the American section (cat. no. 32). After twenty years in Paris, Lucas quickly moved to Italy, then returned to the United States in 1902, setting up his new studio in New York. A regular exhibitor at the famous Folsom and Macbeth galleries, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo and the City Club of New York, he turned to landscape painting, favoring nocturnal representations and luminous atmospheric effects that brought him closer to Impressionism and Whistler. Accurately dated 1893, our painting belongs to Albert Pyke Lucas's Parisian period. Depicting a bust-length profile portrait of a young brunette woman wrapped in an elegant pink, green and yellow floral shawl, it seems to illustrate the artist's Symbolist explorations of the time. Against a dark green background creating an undifferentiated, depthless space reminiscent of Holbein's antique effigies, the model's pose seems to borrow from traditional Italian Renaissance portraits. He differs, however, in the expression of his face, which, emerging from the shawl, chin up, turns his gaze skyward as if to expose it more fully to the light. His somewhat tanned complexion, like his black hair tied in a half-tail behind his head, gives him a Native American look, recalling Lucas's transatlantic origins. Adding to the mystery, he gives this young woman the appearance of a saint, seer, martyr or virgin, whose iconography is drawn from biblical stories, thus testifying to a certain mysticism to which Dagnan-Bouveret was no stranger.

Ref: 6IB8TOPS5R