CHINESE GOD OF LONGEVITY WITH PLATE
Description:
Oil on canvas, 30” x 25”, signed lower right ‘A. Muller-Ury’.
‘A Chinese God of Longevity in green costume, yellow and blue head-dress, red shoes, standing on a black base between a green Chinese porcelain plate with dragon and an apple-green jar containing a red flowering plant. In the foreground is a peach-bloom perfume burner with teak cover and stand from which issues the smoke burning incense./ All resting on a table covered with red fancy cloth edged with crimson.’ (Description in brochure in the Library of the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.)
Location:
Present Whereabouts Unknown.
Provenance:
Duveen Brothers, 1937-1964?
Exhibition:
WILDENSTEIN & CO. INC., 19, East 64th Street, New York, April 20 – May 4, 1937, No. 29.
Bibliography:
New York Mirror, April 21, 1937
In the New York Mirror, April 21, 1937, Barclay Beekman reported that “…One painting of a Buddha and a green-glazed Chinese plate was purchased almost immediately after the exhibition opened by Sir Joseph Duveen.”
This picture seems to have remained in the stock of Duveen Brothers (Stock No. 29778) until the business was sold lock, stock and barrel by Edward Fowles to Mr. Norton Simon of Pasadena, California, in 1964, when it was presumably sold at auction. In the list of works to be sold the original purchase price is stated at $1,800.00. It is not known where the picture was auctioned or sold (possibly January 1968), what it fetched or who bought it and it does not appear in the published lists of pictures sold from the collection, so the possibility remains that it may actually have been disposed of just before Norton Simon’s 1964 takeover.
I am grateful to the librarians at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, holders of Duveen material, for their assistance with this entry.
