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Still Life (Untitled), c. 1935 – 1940, oil on canvas, signed lower left, magazine cover has a 1934 date, 32 x 26 inches, remnant of exhibition label verso
$10,000
In their essay for the ground-breaking book, Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890 – 1945, Susan Landauer and Becky Duval Reese, wrote, “Even the staid genre of still life could provide a subtle commentary on the psychological climate of the era, as in the work of Frances Johnson Skinner (1902 – 1983).” Referring to another of Skinner’s still life oils, Exercise for a Rainy Day (collection Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), they continued, “the painting’s humble subject also has domestic connotations, although its cluttered, haphazard assemblage certainly does not match the image of the cleanly household touted by the popular media during the 1940s.” The same can be said of the present work. With its unusual assortment of objects and the strange light streaming through the window which seems to be cast by the moon, rather than the sun, Still Life has a charged, but quiet mystery, while at the same time being grounded in a very specific time and place signaled by the accurate representation of House Beautiful magazine with its National Recovery Administration stamp, a hallmark of the Great Depression.
Frances Johnson Skinner was a prominent Texas painter and teacher. She was born in Dallas and studied at the Houston Museum School of Art, at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and with Everett Spruce in Dallas. Her career as a painter began in Dallas before she relocated to Houston in 1942, where she was an instructor of drawing and painting and was known to her close friends as "Teacher.” Her work has been represented in numerous exhibitions including Mid-Western Artists in Kansas City, Artists West of the Mississippi in Denver, San Francisco World's Fair, Texas Centennial in Dallas, New Zealand-Wesleyan College Exchange Exhibit in The Hague, Holland, Pennsylvania Academy Annual in Philadelphia, the National Academy of Design Annual in New York, The American Contemporary Art, Rockefeller Center, and Argent Galleries in New York, and in solo shows in Sartor Galleries in Dallas, Dallas Little Theatre, Texas Fine Arts Association, and the Junior League of Houston. She was awarded the following prizes: Purchase Prize, Dallas Museum League, 1940, Kiest Prize, Dallas, 1941, Lawrence Award, Dallas, 1942, First Prize, Texas Fine Arts Association, 1943, and Watercolor Prize, 1948, Purchase Prize, Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, 1943, Prize for Still Life, National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, 1945, Prize Texas General Exhibition, 1947, First Prize, Texas Fine Arts, 1949, National Association of Women Painters, Mildred Aiken prize for portraits, 1949. Examples of her work have been acquired by numerous collectors, as well as by the Dallas and Houston Museums, and the Dallas Public School District. She once held the position of Instructor of Drawing and Painting at the Museum School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts of Houston. Skinner is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.