LOT DETAILS

Materials:

Watercolor on paper laid on board

Size Notes:

(sight); matted to 30 x 38 inches

Markings:

Signed lower right: Jerry Bywaters

Condition:

Staining to upper right and lower right; light overall paper discoloration with very faint matburn; possible water damage to bottom edge of mat. Not framed.

Provenance:

The artist; Humble Oil, commissioned from the above; Collection of ExxonMobil; Private collection, acquired from the above, 2013; Private collection, Kingwood, Texas. The present work was reproduced as an interior centerfold for The HumbleWay periodical in September-October 1949. Born in Paris, Texas, Gerard "Jerry" Bywaters moved to Dallas in 1917. He studied at Southern Methodist University, the Dallas Art Institute, and the Art Students League. Bywaters also painted at the American Impressionist colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut as well as in France and Spain. He helped found the Dallas Artists League and the Lone Star Printmakers, exhibiting in most of the major Texas art exhibitions held before World War II. Bywaters was a leading member of a group of young, innovative Texas Regionalists and Modernists, including Alexandre Hogue, William Lester, and Otis Dozier. Eventually, this group would become known as the Dallas Nine, and make Dallas one of the most dynamic centers of American Regionalism during the 1930s and 1940s. Bywaters was director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Art (now the Dallas Museum of Art) from 1943 to 1964. His long tenure had a huge impact on the Dallas arts community, a legacy that continues today. In the 1930s and 1940s, Bywaters completed many works based on the people, places, and industries of north or west Texas. He was one of several Texas Regionalists who completed illustrations of the oil industry, like, Spudder in the Panhandle, The Humble Way interior illustration 1949, for Humble Oil's publication. It is quite different in style from Stores in Shafter 1938, a classic example of Texas Regionalism, which evokes the poverty, isolation, uncertainty, and decay found in many rural Texas towns at the end of the Great Depression.