Lot 242: Emma Serena Dillard “Queena” Stovall "Images of Country Life "

This interesting piece depicts a time in American History about a woman artist. It is professionally matted, framed and well-preserved ready to display. The artist, Emma Serena Dillard “Queena” Stovall was born in 1887 in Amherst County, Virginia. Stovall did not start painting until the age of sixty-two. In 1949, she enrolled at Randolph Macon Woman’s College to take art classes under Pierre Daura. However, Daura liked her natural style of painting so much that he advised her to stop taking classes with him so she could develop her own unique style without influence. Even after Stovall stopped taking art classes at Randolph Macon, she developed a lifelong friendship with Daura. Stovall’s artwork depicted both black and white Virginians in rural settings, which earned her the title of the “Grandma Moses of Virginia” and the label of a southern memory painter. She combined bright colors with attentive details to produce scenes of ordinary rural life such as crop harvests, animal butchering, funerals, jarring for the winter, baptisms, cooking, and livestock and estate auctions. Since she was self-taught, Stovall would use figures out of magazines and advertisements to understand the composition needed for her paintings. In 1956, Stovall displayed her first solo exhibition at the Lynchburg Art Center. Stovall continued to paint until her health started to fail in the late 1960’s. Her last completed piece titled Comp’ny Comin’ was finished in 1967. A major traveling exhibition of her work entitled “Queena Stovall: Artist of the Blue Ridge Piedmont” formed and was displayed at Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, and at the New York State Historical Association in 1975. Queena Stovall died in June of 1980 at the age of ninety-three. Her grave is located in the Presbyterian Cemetery of Lynchburg. In 1994, her art was featured in the exhibition “Grandma Moses’ Southern Sisters: Queena Stovall and Clementine Hunter” and she was honored by the Library of Virginia in 2010 in the Virginia Women in History presentation for her contributions to folk art. There was even a film titled “Queena Stovall: Life’s Narrow Space” made about her life in 1983 and a book titled The Art of Queena Stovall: Images of Country Life produced in 1986 filled with reproduction prints of her artwork.

Excellent

Private Estate