Albert Pike Lucas (jersey City, 1862 - New York, 1945) - Woman In Profile, 1893

Albert Pike Lucas (Jersey City, 1862 – New York, 1945)
Woman in Profile, 1893
Oil on canvas
41 x 33 cm
70 x 60.5 cm with its frame
Signed 'AP Lucas' upper left, located and dated 'Paris 1893' upper right.

Provenance: New York, private collection.

Originally from New Jersey, Albert Pike spent time at the Packer Institute in Brooklyn before choosing an artistic vocation and embarking at the age of twenty for Europe. After a study trip of several months in Belgium and Holland, he settled in Paris where he joined the École des Beaux-arts in 1882. He first studied there under Gustave Boulanger, then joined the studios of Ernest Hébert, Gustave Courtois and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, with whom he studied until 1888. A curious mind, he also devoted himself to sculpture and received lessons from Jean-Antoine Injalbert at the same school. From 1890 to 1901, he exhibited almost every year at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-arts, of which he became an associate member in 1892. By combining precise and rigorous naturalist drawing with decorative symbolism, his subjects were most often a pretext for depicting the female nude in nature and thus met with some critical acclaim. In 1896, his large painting The Call, depicting three naked women in a landscape, won an award at the Salon du Champ de Mars (cat. no. 833), before receiving another medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. At the 1900 World's Fair, he surprised everyone by exhibiting a bust, Sambo, in the American section (cat. no. 32). After twenty years in Paris, Lucas briefly spent time in Italy, then returned permanently to the United States in 1902, setting up his new studio in New York. A regular exhibitor at the famous Folsom and Macbeth galleries, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the City Club of New York, he turned to landscape painting, favoring nocturnal representations and atmospheric lighting effects, bringing him closer to Impressionism and Whistler. Precisely dated 1893, our canvas is part of Albert Pyke Lucas's Parisian period. Featuring a bust and profile portrait of a young brunette wrapped in an elegant pink, green, and yellow floral shawl, it seems to illustrate the symbolist explorations the artist was pursuing at the time. Against a dark green background creating an undifferentiated, depthless space reminiscent of Holbein's ancient effigies, the model appears to borrow her pose from traditional Italian Renaissance portraits. However, she is distinguished by the expression of her face, which, emerging from the shawl, her chin raised, turns her gaze toward the sky as if to expose her more to the light. Her somewhat tanned complexion, like her black hair tied in a half-ponytail behind her head, gives her the appearance of a Native American, recalling Lucas's transatlantic origins. Accentuating the mystery, the latter gives this young woman the appearance of a saint, seer, martyr or virgin whose iconography would be drawn from biblical stories, thus testifying to a certain mysticism to which Dagnan-Bouveret was no stranger.