DILWORTH, Mrs Dewees (Edith Josephine Logan)
Description:
Half-length standing holding a Pekinese. Oil on canvas, signed upper left ‘A. Muller-Ury’.
Location:
Present Whereabouts Unknown.
Exhibition:
RALSTON GALLERIES, 567 Fifth Avenue, New York, c. February 24 to March 3, 1917 – Fourteen Portraits by Contemporary American painters.
HENRY REINHARDT & SON, 565, Fifth Avenue, New York, January/February 1918.
DUVEEN GALLERIES, 720, Fifth Avenue, New York, April 6 – 18, 1925, No. 9.
WILDENSTEIN & CO., INC., 19, East 64th Street, New York, April 20 – May 4, 1937, No. 11.
Bibliography:
American Art News, Vol. 15, No. 20, February 24, 1917, New York, p. 3
The Spur, New York, February 15, 1918, p. 24 (reproduced in colour)
New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1937.
The sitter was born on 29 October 1894 in Youngstown Ohio and died 26 September 1974 in Southampton, New York. This portrait was painted in 1917, when the sitter lived at 375 Park Avenue, New York City. Her husband Dewees Wood Dilworth (1889-1958), whom she married 25 November 1913 in New York, was an investment broker whose brother Richard Dilworth was Mayor of Philadelphia. Their son J. Richardson Dilworth, was a philanthropist and retired financier who was a former chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and died in 1997 aged 81. Richardson Dilworth informed the editor that he had never seen this Muller-Ury portrait of his mother.
American Art News, February 24, 1917, describes the portrait as ‘…charming in expression, in soft gray and black tones, and painted with facility, ease and grace, which evidence almost a new manner for this artist.’
The Spur magazine says the coloured photograph was courtesy of Henry Reinhardt & Son. The photograph in the artist’s papers is stamped Mary Hopson.
