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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Chief Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for her assistance in cataloguing the present work.
It is hard not to see in this 1966 collaged oil painting a hint of self-portraiture. Joseph Cornell had always led an hermitic existence in comparison with other leading exponents of the avant-garde and by the mid-1960s when his reputation as one of the leading Surrealist artists of the twentieth century was well established, his somewhat undeserved reputation as an ultimately reclusive character was also widespread. Cornell's choice of representing St Jerome, the hermitic biblical scholar who lived alone in the wilderness inevitably draws a parallel with his own personal status at this time.
Seated reading, in deep concentration, this ascetic saint is shown silhouetted against a low horizon and the vast, mysterious expanse of the heavens. Much of Cornell's art, particularly his boxes, was concerned with a visual and poetic evocation of cosmos as a vast and complex mystery. Here, the contrast between the studious master carefully examining the minutiae of learned wisdom and the sublime empty vastness of the heavens above him is emphasised by the figure's stark isolation against an empty horizon. While the lone figure of Jerome studies his book a mysterious, painted form has also appeared in the sky above him - a simple inexplicable materialisation that ultimately lends the work an aura of mystery and intrigue like that to be found in the hermetic sciences.
It is hard not to see in this 1966 collaged oil painting a hint of self-portraiture. Joseph Cornell had always led an hermitic existence in comparison with other leading exponents of the avant-garde and by the mid-1960s when his reputation as one of the leading Surrealist artists of the twentieth century was well established, his somewhat undeserved reputation as an ultimately reclusive character was also widespread. Cornell's choice of representing St Jerome, the hermitic biblical scholar who lived alone in the wilderness inevitably draws a parallel with his own personal status at this time.
Seated reading, in deep concentration, this ascetic saint is shown silhouetted against a low horizon and the vast, mysterious expanse of the heavens. Much of Cornell's art, particularly his boxes, was concerned with a visual and poetic evocation of cosmos as a vast and complex mystery. Here, the contrast between the studious master carefully examining the minutiae of learned wisdom and the sublime empty vastness of the heavens above him is emphasised by the figure's stark isolation against an empty horizon. While the lone figure of Jerome studies his book a mysterious, painted form has also appeared in the sky above him - a simple inexplicable materialisation that ultimately lends the work an aura of mystery and intrigue like that to be found in the hermetic sciences.