Painted around 1927, Mexican Hilltown offers a fascinating amalgam of several influences on Schille’s personal approach to her art. The verticality of the village and its interlocking forms evokes Cezanne’s geometric landscapes while the impressionist, almost pointillist, rendering of the foreground trees shows her appreciation for Prendergast’s dappled brushwork in his own watercolors. However, the painting is entirely Schille’s creation, showing her keen eye for composition, her embrace of bold color, and her fearless pigment application of wet-on-wet watercolor to achieve depth and luminosity.

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Alice Schille was a master of watercolor. Her fresh, beautifully colored depictions of beaches, villages, gardens, children, and city streets earned her over a dozen awards, including top prizes at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. In 1982, and in conjunction with Keny Galleries in Columbus, Ohio, Vose Galleries held the first major exhibition of her watercolors for purchase since the teens, a show which served to resurface her incredible work and prompted several other exhibitions throughout the country. Today, her work is represented at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio as well as the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas.

Provenance:

Keny and Johnson Gallery (now Keny Galleries), Columbus, Ohio

With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. AS-62, 1982

To private collection, Concord, Massachusetts, October 1984 to present

Labels:

Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. AS-62