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ARTHUR FITZWILLIAM TAIT (American, 1819-1905). A Brood of Chicks, 1865. Oil on millboard . 9 x 12 inches (22.9 x 30.5 cm...
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Description
ARTHUR FITZWILLIAM TAIT (American, 1819-1905)A Brood of Chicks, 1865
Oil on millboard
9 x 12 inches (22.9 x 30.5 cm) (painted oval in rectangular format)
Signed and dated lower right: A.J. Tait / 65
Inscribed in pencil in the upper right corner of the board (outside the painted oval): Snedicor 446
PROVENANCE:
Sold at Henry H. Leed's sale, New York, April 5, 1866;
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York (label verso);
Private collection.
LITERATURE:
W.H. Cadbury, Arthur Firzwilliam Tait: Artist in the Adirondacks, Newark, London and Toronto, 1986, no. 66.9, p. 189 (ill.) as "[No.] 446 Chickens, millboard 12 x 9 oval."
The pencil annotation "Snedicor 446" is Tait's idiosyncratic spelling for John Snedecor, one of his most important art agents. Snedecor began as a picture framer who worked his way into the retail art market. As Cadbury noted, in addition to framing and selling Tait's work, Snedecor also handled many of the commercial details for the artist while he was living in suburban Morrisania: he handled the delivery of paintings as well as the payment transactions for the artist's privately commissioned canvases. "In 1860," Cadbury writes, "Snedecor became one of the first New York art dealers to capitalize on the auction as a method of merchandising paintings. Such auctions became so popular and successful that their number tripled in the next ten years. Competitive bidding in public sales rooms began to replace the older system of friendly and private negotiations between patron and painter in the studio" (p. 76).
Snedecor's Gallery was located at 7678 Broadway. There, with Henry H. Leeds, the foremost auctioneer in the City, he held two special sales of Tait's work. The first was in December of 1893, when fifty-eight paintings were put on the block, and a second, larger auction followed three years later, on April 5, 1865. The present painting was one of the 69 paintings sold in the second auction, where Tait netted a total of $5,000. The catalogue for this second auction reveals that Tait--or Snedecor--had saved up work for some three years to sell at this special sale.
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