In the Ear, 1865

GEORGE COCHRAN LAMBDIN (1830 – 1896)
In the Ear, 1865
Oil on canvas
22 x 27 inches
Signed and dated at lower right (on fence rail): Geo. C. Lambdin. 1865.
Inscribed on reverse (on stretcher panel): "In the Ear" / Geo. C. Lambdin / 1865
Period frame

PROVENANCE

Victor D.Spark, New York, New York
Knoedler, New York, New York
Vose Galleries of Boston, Inventory #24446
Mr. Charles Buckley, New Hampshire, until 2007

EXHIBITED

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1867, no. 80
(Loan) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Victor D. Spark, T.L. 4827


George Cochran Lambdin was born in 1830 in Pittsburgh, the son of James Reid Lambdin, a successful portraitist from whom he received his early artistic training. He continued his artistic studies in Munich and Paris in 1855 and Rome in 1870, where he developed a highly polished and academically grounded painting technique.

Established in Philadelphia, Lambdin began exhibiting tender-hearted genre scenes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1848. He achieved great renown and popularity with his genre scenes, in particular for his Civil-War era works. In the Ear represents Lambdin at the peak of his narrative and painterly skills, depicting a young woman and her suitor in a lushly rendered corn field. Painted in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, this work celebrates rural American life and love. Lambdin was also celebrated as a painter of still-lifes and his attention to botanical details in this work is remarkable, with the ear of corn playing a central role.

In the Ear was formerly owned by the prominent collector Victor D. Spark, and subsequently by Charles Buckley, Director of the Currier Museum of Art, 1955-64. It was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1867, and was also on loan to the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts from Mr. Spark.