Lot 113: JAMES SHARPLES (1751/2-1811) George Washington backboards hand-inscribed

JAMES SHARPLES (1751/2-1811) George Washington backboards hand-inscribed in ink, General Washington/ by James Sharples/ 1796; typed paper label, Original wood backing./ Paper labels removed and filed separately/ Note burned-in inscription above center/ of wood backing./ April 1969; printed paper label of Childs Gallery, Boston detailing provenance pastel on paper 9O x 7æ in. executed 1796-1801

Provenance: James Randall Lake (1851-1925), St. Louis, Missouri, Washington D.C., New York City, and Maplewood, New Jersey William Macbeth, Inc., New York, by purchase from above Charles Henry Hart (1847-1918), by purchase from above, November 1910 Herbert Lee Pratt (1871-1945), New York City and Glen Cove, Long Island, by purchase from above Harriet B. Pratt (d. 1978) (m. 1923 Lawrence B. Van Ingen; m. 1938 Donald Fairfax Bush), New York, daughter Childs Gallery, Boston EXHIBITED: New York, The Grolier Club, Washington Bi-Centennial Exhibition, December 1931-January 1932. LITERATURE: Charles Henry Hart, Historical Descriptive and Critical Catalogue of the Works of American Artists in Collection of Herbert L. Pratt, Glen Cove, L.I. (New York, 1917), p. 91, no. 41. Theodore Bolton, James Sharples, Art in America, vol. XI, no. 3 (April 1923), p. 140, no. 60. Joseph Dillway Sawyer, Washington, vol. 2 (New York, 1927), p. 448. Katharine McCook Knox, The Sharples: Their Portraits of George Washington and His Contemporaries (New Haven, 1930), p. 87, no. 40. John Hill Morgan and Mantle Fielding, The Life Portraits of Washington and Their Replicas (Philadelphia, 1931), p. 407, no. 21. Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, no. J.675.715, online edition, www.pastellists.com, accessed December 10, 2020. Frick Art Reference Library, ref. 257-4a. Writing shortly before his death, George Washington Parke Custis shared his opinions on the merits of several of the portraits of his stepgrandfather and adopted father. The 1796 picture in crayon by Sharples, he noted, was the finest and purest likeness of the Chief and the best likeness of the man extant (Letters, George W.P. Custis to T.W.C. Moore, June 6 and July 21, 1857, transcribed in George Washington Parke Custis’s Opinion of Portraits of Washington, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 18, no. 1 (1894), pp. 82-84). The image was also popular in the late 1790s when Sharples sold numerous replicas of his original 1796 portrait, charging