TitleAlchemy
Artist
Priscilla Warren Roberts
(American, 1916 - 2001)
Date1957
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 14 1/4 × 10 1/4 in.
Framed: 19 3/4 × 15 7/8 × 2 1/4 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 6, 1958
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1587-P
Label TextPriscilla Roberts specialized in small still lifes and animal scenes meticulously rendered, to which she gave an aura of mystery through the use of subtle chiaroscuro. Her diploma piece, "Alchemy," reveals her interest in seventeenth-century painting. In an unpublished autobiography, Roberts related how the painting came about:'The motive behind it was that I'd picked up a sack of quite beautiful broken fragments and chunks of some crystalline blue chemical and I thought how pretty they'd look done with bits of gold. The only gold originally available to me was the scrunched up foil wrappers off those big chocolate gold coins, but before my set up was finished, I had what I thought was a real stroke of luck--I had to have a tooth pulled, for which my dentist sent me to a tooth pulling specialist.'
Roberts asked the dentist to give her the gold tooth cap, which she painted as the gold nugget in her still life. (She found out later that the dentist had actually substituted the gold with brass.)
