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About Molly Luce
Molly Luce was a realist painter of the American Scene and a New England Regionalist. She was called "The American Breughel" by art critic Henry McBride of the "New York Sun". Although she was born in Pittsburgh, raised in New Jersey, trained in Massachusetts and New York, and resided in New England, she came from a family whose roots were in northeast Ohio. In 1922 and 1923, Luce traveled in Europe. She lived in Minneapolis in 1925, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1926, Belmont, Massachusetts in 1929, and finally Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Luce had her first exhibition in 1924 at the Whitney Studio Club in New York City. Among many other exhibitions, Luce showed regularly until 1950 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work was collected early by the Whitney. In fact, the Museum acquired two of her paintings from the Studio Club show. Ten years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art added Luce to their collection.
Teachers were miniaturist Amy Otis at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and George Bellows, Kenneth Hayes Miller and F. Louis Mora at the Art Students League in New York City.
Luce's paintings are realistic, yet charged with intensified color and psychological symbolism such as life and death referenced in "Dawn on the Commons," 36 x 24, 1955. A snowy owl in flight, silhouetted against darkly striated clouds, looks down at a nearby black crow almost camouflaged by the darkness of the clouds. The owl flies closely over a dead sunflower stalk and seed-head, with a church and houses small in the distance beyond. And "Fortieth Birthday," seems a comment on the passage of time and a woman reaching that age. Nude to the waist, she sits in nature, chin to hand, while dark crows fly in the sky behind her, and a lamb cavorts next to her as if to lend comfort and support.
In 1979, a retrospective exhibition, "Molly Luce: Eight Decades of the American Scene: A Traveling Exhibition," was put on by the Rhode Island School of Design, and it traveled from 1980 to 1983 to thirteen museums:
Molly Luce died in 1986 at Little Compton, Rhode Island. |
Paintings by Molly Luce
| Route 138 North of Sommerset |
| oil on canvas: 20 x 16 inches |
| signed: lower left |
| circa: 1936 |
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