March 09, 2013

Richard Estes

This beautiful early work by Richard Estes is set at the iconic Bethesda Fountain in New York’s Central Park. Combining plein-air spontaneity with studied compositional harmony, Bethesda Fountain shows a contemporary American interpretation of the Impressionist tradition.

This work is rare because it was executed in 1966, at the very beginning of Estes’s painting career, and two years before the artist’s first solo show in New York. The reflective surface of the fountain water presages Estes’s career-long preoccupation with the ephemeral nature of light and reflections.