Torr Antiques & Decorative Arts

Description

NOTE: Temporarily removed to be reframed in a hand-painted frame.

A fine mid-century post-impressionist style oil on board painting of a Venetian canal with gondolas by the American artist Charles Merrill Mount (1928 - 1995), signed and dated 1958. Mount has a good record of works sold on the secondary market, particularly in the USA, with prices usually in excess of $1000. The label on the reverse for Combridge Ltd, Fine Art Dealers and Picture Framers , based at 18 - 20 Grafton Street and 1a Duke Street, Dublin neatly ties in with Mount's move to Ireland in 1961 where he married and fathered four children. By the end of the 60s he had separated from his wife and returned to New York City.

Dimensions: Frame - 64 x 70.5 cm
Painting in view) 36.5 x 47 cm

Condition: The painting is in its original frame. The linen covered mount is a little scruffy with a water stain bottom right, the frame warped and the backing paper torn. A new owner may wish to reframe or renovate the existing frame.

Postage & packing: £15 within the UK

Biography: Charles Merrill Mount was born Sherman Merrill Suchow in Brooklyn, New York in 1928. Mount attended Columbia University, leaving to study at the Art Students League of New York. In addition to pursuing his own artistic career, Mount published several biographies on artists, including John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart and Claude Monet. Mount exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Mount also participated in exhibitions at Newman Galleries in Philadelphia, Hotel Barbizon in New York, Capricorn Galleries in Maryland, and Grand Central Art Galleries in New York.

Mount was a strange man: visualising himself as an Edwardian gentleman, affecting an English accent, habitually carrying a walking stick and wearing a bowler hat and bespoke suits tailored especially for him from London, though, in fact, sourced from the Salvation Army. He unsuccessfully sued the Director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery over the dis-attribution of a portrait of George Washington in the New Bedford Library in Massachusetts, after which his life seemed to fall apart. In 1987, he was arrested for stealing Civil War letters from the National Archives. He also was charged in Boston for trying to sell Lincoln, Henry James and Churchill letters from the Library of Congress to a bookstore in Boston.

The New York Times ran a piece on 23rd August 1987: "Though he knows the criminal charges are serious, Mr. Mount, who is free on bail, is treating the case as would some character out of Waugh or Wodehouse, as a sticky but somehow amusing adventure."

In 1989 Mount was convicted and sentenced to 8 years in prison. He died in 1995.