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23 March 2010  |  Photographs & Prints   |  Article

An English Garden, Through Memphis Eyes

Lauded as America’s first color photographer, William Eggleston is most well-known for capturing the ordinary people and places of the American South, particularly his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. When viewed through Eggleston’s masterful lens, these everyday subjects elicit a sense of wonder and imagination that only he can visually record.

In 1988, Eggleston began taking a series of color photographs of England which he refers to as English Rose. Gifted from the artist to a local Memphis friend, the group of 40 prints currently on offer represents the only photographs from this series to appear at auction, and perhaps the only group of its kind in existence. Eggleston approaches his post-Romantic garden scenes with such a singular style that they are immediately recognizable and attributable to him. In the words of Matthieu Humery, Head of Photographs, “In the same way that he finds beauty in the minutiae of everyday Southern life, Eggleston interprets the curious disorder of the English garden as an object of beauty with limitless visual potential.”


Related Sale
Sale 2304
Photographs
15 Apr 2010
New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Related Departments
Photographs

Related Artists
William Eggleston

Keywords
Photographs
William Eggleston
1980s
United States of America
Contemporary
landscape

Lot 305, Sale 2304
WILLIAM EGGLESTON (B. 1939)
English Rose, 1986
Price Realized: $37,500