Details
Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864-1941)
Laurel Hill, Arlington, New Jersey
signed and dated 'Elshemus./1907' (lower left)
oil on board
22¾ x 26½ in. (57.8 x 67.3 cm.)
Painted in 1907
Provenance
Valentine Gallery, New York.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, New York, acquired from the above, 1932.
Gift to the late owners from the above, circa 1940s.
Literature
P. Karlstrom, Louis Michel Eilshemius, New York, 1978, p. 15, pl. 5, illustrated.
D.B. Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. III, New York, 1980, p. 459.
J. Barnitz, et al., The David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection: Art of the Western Hemisphere, vol. II, New York, 1988, pp. 66-67, illustrated.
G.M. Cohen, The Essentials of American Art, Piscataway, New Jersey, 2000, p. 68.
Exhibited
New York, Valentine Gallery, Louis M. Eilshemius, An Authentic American Painter: Period of Searching and Concentration, 1889-1910, Romantic Drama, February 22-March 5, 1932.
Special notice
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Lot Essay

Laurel Hill Manor was the Eilshemius family summer home near Newark, New Jersey. With a sixteen-room house on over seventy acres sloping down to the Passaic River, the property was lavishly landscaped with "terrace after terrace, through aisles of trees, the successive landings flanked by stone urns and statuary." (W. Schack, And He Sat Among the Ashes, New York, 1939, p. 21)

Although Louis Michel Eilshemius painted the present work in 1907, the composition was inspired by a photograph of the flower garden from almost forty years earlier, which shows the young artist at five years old with his beloved brother Victor at the top of the stairs. The original 1869 photograph was printed in Eilshemius's self-published poetry book My Brother Victor: A Convalescent's Fancy in 1912.

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