New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of the Estate of George Deem, 2013. Accession Number 2013.54.105
| Image Notes
Reference Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, c. 1926-36, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses, 1884-89, The Art Institute of Chicago
| Artist's Notes
School of Arshile Gorky, 1995
It is perhaps the first day of school. Flowers in hand, the young painter-to-be Arshile Gorky has arrived with his mother. The picture on the wall behind them is my reduction of The Sacred Grove (1884-89), a painting by Puvis de Chavannes who when he died in 1898 was the most famous painter in France. Seurat, Gauguin, and Matisse all responded to the decorative flatness, the airless tranquility in his clearly delineated compositions.
-- How To Paint A Vermeer: A Painter's History of Art, Thames & Hudson, 2004 (113)
