Albert Pike Lucas 1862-1945

Originally from New Jersey, Albert Pike made a brief stay at the Packer Institute in Brooklyn before choosing an artistic vocation and setting out for Europe at the age of twenty. After a study trip of several months in Belgium and Holland, he settled in Paris, where he joined the École des Beaux-Arts in 1882. He first studied under Gustave Boulanger, then joined the studios of Ernest Hébert, Gustave Courtois, and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, with whom he studied until 1888. A curious mind, he also devoted himself to sculpture and received lessons from Jean-Antoine Injalbert at the same school. From 1890 to 1901, he exhibited almost every year at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, becoming an associate member in 1892. By combining precise and rigorous naturalistic drawing with decorative symbolism, his subjects were most often an occasion to depict the female nude in nature, which earned him a certain success with the critics. In 1896, his large painting L’Appel, showing three nude women in a landscape, was awarded at the Salon du Champ de Mars (cat. no. 833), before receiving another medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle, he surprised by exhibiting a bust, Sambo, in the American section (cat. no. 32). After twenty years in Paris, Lucas briefly stayed in Italy before returning permanently to the United States in 1902, establishing his new studio in New York. A regular exhibitor at the famous Folsom and Macbeth galleries, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the City Club of New York, he turned toward landscape painting, favoring nocturnal scenes and luminous atmospheric effects that brought him closer to Impressionism and Whistler.

Precisely dated to 1893, our painting belongs to Albert Pyke Lucas’s Parisian period. It depicts a bust and profile portrait of a young brunette woman wrapped in an elegant floral shawl of pink, green, and yellow, seemingly illustrating the Symbolist explorations the artist was pursuing at the time. Set against a dark green background creating an undifferentiated, depthless space reminiscent of Holbein’s antique effigies, the model appears to borrow her pose from traditional Italian Renaissance portraits. However, she is distinguished by the expression of her face, which emerges from the shawl, chin raised, turning her gaze toward the sky as if to expose herself more fully to the light. Her slightly tanned complexion, along with her black hair tied in a half-up style behind her head, gives her the appearance of a Native American, recalling Lucas’s transatlantic origins. Enhancing the sense of mystery, the artist imparts to this young woman the appearance of a saint, seer, martyr, or virgin, whose iconography seems drawn from biblical narratives, reflecting a mysticism to which Dagnan-Bouveret was not a stranger.