TitleFigures in front of a Spanish building
Artist
Walter Shirlaw
(1838-1909)
Daten.d.
MediumWatercolor over charcoal on cream wove paper
DimensionsSheet size: 9 1/2 × 18 7/16 in.
Mat size: 16 × 20 1/2 in.
SignedSigned in watercolor at BL: "WS[monogram]hirlaw".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, 1953
Object number1981.251
Label TextIn 1951, the artist Marcel Duchamp, acting as executor of the will of the great modernist collector Katherine S. Dreier, arranged for the gift of over 40 works by Shirlaw to the National Academy. Dreier studied privately with Shirlaw from 1903-1909. In 1929, she remarked: “People wonder at my love for the beauty I find in Shirlaw’s work associating me as they do with the Abstract in Art - but without the training which Shirlaw gave me in Beauty-Vitality-Rhythm - and Design - or Organization - I could never have taken the Step or Leap into this new great expression in art, based as it is fundamentally on these manifestations.”
