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MARY ELIZABETH PRICE (american 1877–1965) "HOLLYHOCK AND ORIENTAL POPPY" Signed 'M ELIZABETH PRICE' bottom left; also titled and signed verso, oil with gold and silver leaf on Masonite 40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2cm) provenance: Private Collection, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By descent in the family. Private Collection, Washington D.C. NOTE: Along with Fern Coppedge, Mary Elizabeth Price is considered one of the most important women artists associated with the Pennsylvania Impressionists. Although she was born in Virginia to Quaker parents, Price spent all her childhood on a farm in Solebury Township, Bucks County, where her mother was been born. She remained there all her life, until her death in 1965. The sister of a famous gallery owner in New York, a reputed frame maker in Bucks County and the sister-in-law of Rae Sloan Bredin, Mary Elizabeth Price evolved in a family with close ties to the art world. From 1896 to 1904, she studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts). She then attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied still life painting and drawing under the tutelage of Hugh Breckenridge and Daniel Garber. Today, Price is best known for her floral panels and screens, which she started to explore gradually after 1928, using the irises, peonies, poppies, lilies, delphiniums and hollyhocks that she grew in her cottage garden as her main source of inspiration. Through her captivating still lifes, Price revived an old technique of the Italian Renaissance. Like Florentine and Sienese artists of the 15th century before her, she use a full palette of oil color, which she richly applied on a gilded surface of gesso (sometimes covered by no less than sixteen different shades of gold and silver leaf), preliminary incised with intricate designs. As exemplified by Hollyhock and Oriental Poppy, the result consists in a dazzling representation of unusually colorful flowers magically set against a glistening background, charging it with an ethereal, almost timeless quality. In addition to her well-known floral works, Price also produced landscapes, scenes of village and farm life, as well as a series of sixteenth-century Spanish galleons, one of which won the Carnegie Prize in 1927. Vessel From the Spanish Treasure Fleet (Lot 145) is a charming example of one of the numerous boats affiliated with the legendary West Indies Fleet.