Fauve Still Life with Flowers - like Louis Valtat

This colorful painting by Eleanor Parke Custis is in the spirit of Louis Valtat and the Fauves. The subject of flowers in the foreground is repeated in the backdrop. It straddles the line between abstraction and representation. Signed lower right - Work is framed.
Eleanor Parke Custis studied in Corcoran School of the Arts and Design under Edmund C. Tarbell and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Henry B. Snell. Initially, she began her art career as a painter, creating watercolors. Custis created illustrations for Scribner's Magazine, Harper's, Doubleday, Harcourt. She started to take photographs in her youth, using a Brownie camera, switching to professional photography in the 1930s, following a trip abroad. Eleanor Parke Custis used The bromoil process, invented in 1907, bleaching a print on bromide paper in order to remove the blackened silver. The areas of a picture that need to be dark are then painted using a brush. Custis studied at the Corcoran School of Art with Edmund Tarbell and Henry B. Snell. She was a member of the American Watercolor Society, the Boston Art Club, National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors and other art associations. In 1935 Eleanor Parke Custis wrote and illustrated a photography book - "Composition and Pictures".
Custis' technique was different from many other American pictorialists. She made her images softly focused, using a "Flou-Net" enlarging diffuser, invented by Belgian pictorialist Léonard Misonne. This technique produced dark halos along the edges of shadowed areas, creating a romantic effect which was well suited to the travel photographs she made in Europe and South America
She had several exhibitions in Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City. She had a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1940 and at the Smithsonian Institution1947