Percival leonard rousseau biography of barack

Transcript

Interview

PC: PAUL CUMMINGS
HM: A. HYATT MAYOR

PC: March 21. Paul Cummings talking with A. Hyatt Mayor. What is the initial for?

HM: Alpheus. My grandfather was Alpheus Hyatt, my uncle was Alpheus Hyatt, my great-grandfather was Alpheus Hyatt. And his father was one of a number of sons in Baltimore and my grandmother used to say that they were called Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego and all died and Alpheus came along and he survived. But I don't use it because, when I was born, there was my grandfather Ally and there was my uncle Alph, so that kind of used up that name. I always thought that it was a classical name, the Alpheus and Eurydice and so forth. But, when I went to Mt. Athos, the monks would ask me my name. It was no use saying Hyatt or Mayor, so I would say Alpheus. And they would say "very apostolic." Sure enough, there are two Alpheuses in the New Testament: the brother of Zebedee and somebody else.

PC: Well, what is your family background? Is it all American for a long, long time?

HM: Yes. My great, great, great grandfather or something like that, Christian Mayor, came from Ulm in Wurtemberg as the Consul from Wurtemberg in the 1780's.

He settled in Baltimore and the family has been there ever since. My mother's mother came from Kinderhook in upstate New York. And the rest of them all came from Baltimore. The whole batch of them. My grandfather Hyatt was the son of the sort of Park & Tilford's of Baltimore, the very rich grocers. He was sent to Harvard just before the Civil War. The only letter of introduction he had was to the leading wine merchant of Boston. And he absolutely appalled his family by becoming a paleontologist. They didn't expect that. They'd much rather see him come back a drunkard, I think. I don't know. My grandfather Mayor also went North. He went to be educated at Stevens Tech where he later taught. He worked with Edison on the pho

Review by Madelia Hickman Ring, Catalog Photos Courtesy Doyle’s

NEW YORK CITY – Doyle offered nearly 300 lots of American paintings, furniture and decorative arts on May 5 in a sale that brought nearly its high estimate and achieved $1,080,450 against a low/high estimate range of $725,900/1,138,800. With competitive bidding across multiple categories, the sale was 94 percent sold by lot.

The fine art section brought many of the highest prices, an unsurprising result given the category featured examples by many blue-chip American artists, but it was an exquisite charcoal drawing on paper, titled “Cherry Tree,” by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) that realized the sale’s top price of $53,550. The drawing had been initially owned by the Reverend and Mrs. Arthayer R. Sanborn, who lived in Nyack, N.Y., where Hopper had been born. Bill Fiddler, Doyle’s director of American art, noted that the work had been restored but was in good condition. It sold to a private collector in New York City.

Percival Leonard Rosseau’s (American, 1859-1937) “Bird Dogs” from 1917 received a lot of interest prior to the sale, so Fiddler was not surprised that it did well. The painting of two setters fetched $47,250 from a buyer in the United States, topping its $25/45,000 estimate. Rosseau was born in Louisiana and studied in Paris at the Academie Julian. A painting of his wife with two Irish wolfhounds exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1904 was so well received by the critics that he began to specialize in painting dogs. He returned to the United States in 1915, joined the art colony at Old Lyme, Conn., and pursued his specialty of painting scenes of sporting dogs.