Carroll Cloar (American/Tennessee/Arkansas, 1913-1993), acrylic on board painting titled The Explorer, depicting a man in a rowboat, with binoculars, viewing the landscape around him. The lush green trees in the background, rendered in precise pointillist brush strokes, are mostly blocked from the subject’s view by clusters of brick commercial buildings, reflected in the placid water; while in the right foreground the landscape seems to disintegrate into thin air. Housed in a silver-gilt molded frame. Signed in script “Carroll Cloar” lower left. Board: 23″H x 34″W. Frame – 30″H x 40″W. Titled en verso and dated 8-82 (August, 1982) with additional inscription of artist’s name and showing measurements and medium. Note: Carroll Cloar’s work is celebrated for capturing “the essence of a vanishing South” (Marilyn Sadler, “The Art and Life of Carroll Cloar”, Memphis Magazine, June 1, 2011). The artist was known for incorporating nostalgic images, often from his Southern childhood, sometimes merged with dreamlike motifs, into powerful magic realist scenes, and he often noted that literature, particularly by Southern Gothic writers such as William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, influenced his artistic approach. Born in Arkansas, Cloar graduated from Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee, and went on to study at the Memphis Academy of Arts under the artist George Oberteuffer. In 1936, he moved to New York to attend the Art Students League. There, Cloar’s achievements earned him a McDowell fellowship which he used to travel across the American Southwest, West Coast and Mexico. Cloar served with the Army Air Corps during World War II and upon his return, he was awarded a Guggenheim traveling scholarship to fund an extended sojourn to Central and South America. Two years later, several of his images were featured in a Life Magazine article titled Backwoods Boyhood, and Cloar’s work began to earn national acclaim. By the mid 1950s, he had settled permanently in Memphis, where he produced paintings, often executed in casein tempera and acrylic paints. His works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooks Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. In 1993, Cloar’s painting, Faculty and Honor Students, Lewis Schoolhouse, was one of six paintings by American artists selected to commemorate the inauguration of President Clinton. (Sources: The Johnson Collection/Memphis Brooks Museum of Art).

PROVENANCE: The collection of Judy and Pete Nebhut, Nashville, TN.

CONDITION: Painting is in excellent condition with a couple of tiny scattered faint spots of grime or inclusions in the lake area. Frame has a few minor spots of slight wear to edges but is also in overall excellent condition.