William Thon (1906 – 2000)

Victorian Atlanta, by 1953, oil on canvas, 34 x 21 inches, Midtown Galleries label verso with artist’s name and title, label verso reads: “Norton Gallery of Art / Crate No. / Box _3 / No. 6 / Use Ball Point Pen”, exhibited: 15th Southeastern Exhibition, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC, Norton Gallery, Palm Beach, FL, and seven other southern museums, 1953 – 1954 (see 1) American Contemporary Exhibition Opens Today, The Birmingham News, May 3, 1953; 2) Shocking, Thought Provoking Modern Paintings on Display, The State, October 4, 1953; and 3) ECK, 15th Southeastern Exhibition Is Opened At Norton Gallery, The Palm Beach Post, December 31, 1953), literature: Gruskin, Alan, The Painter and His Techniques: Wiliam Thon, The Viking Press (1964), p. 150, provenance includes Midtown Galleries, New York and the Estate of Robert Clary, Beverly Hills, California, presented in its original frame 

$5,500

New York born William Thon, is often associated with his home state as well as Maine, where he lived much of his adult life. During the early 1950s, however, Thon spent time in the American South, first in 1951 as a guest instructor at the High Museum, Atlanta Art Institute, Agnes Scott College, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and then in 1954 as a watercolor instructor at the Norton School of Art in Palm Beach, Florida. While living and working in the South, Thon continued the 1930s and 1940s tradition of painting the local scene, albeit with a modernist twist. In connection with the 15th Southeastern Exhibition, a show consisting of contemporary works drawn painters across the United States which traveled to ten Southern museums, the Columbia, South Carolina newspaper The State, remarked, “William Thon’s ‘Victorian Atlanta’ is what the artist, recently a study-fellow on a grant at the University of Georgia, finds in the state’s capital city. It consciously proves one need not go to New York’s Greenwich Village or Montmartre in Paris to find subject matter.”

For the focus of his painting, Thon selected a narrow ramshackle building sandwiched between other structures. Although depicting an Atlanta boarding house with its conspicuous “Rooms for Rent” sign and vernacular American wood and iron adornments, Victorian Atlanta draws on the visual vocabulary adopted by Thon during his time at the American Academy of Rome, where he had been granted a fellowship in 1947. Thon’s sketchy, vaguely outlined structures with their loosely applied shimmering pigments recall his earlier works following his Italian sojourn, such as Ancient Architecture (1950, California Palace of the Legion of Honor) and Venetian Church (1950) which were fashioned by the extensive use of a palette knife or spatula to create complex surface textures. The orientation, structure and overall composition of Victorian Atlanta mirror another 1953 canvas, Italian Arches, as Thon seems to draw an overt comparison between Old World forms and the American South of the 1950s.

Victorian Atlanta comes from one of the most significant times in Thon’s career when his works routinely found critical and commercial success with collectors and museums, including the Whitney Museum of Modern Art (Midnight Quarry, acquired 1952) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art (Quarry, acquired 1952), and his works often won prestigious awards such as the $1500 First Altman Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1954. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and all other standard references.