Van Day Truex Ink Wash and Watercolor Self-Portrait, circa 1945

A unique and original circa 1945 self-portrait by the legendary designer Van Day Truex painted in black ink, ink wash, and watercolor on celadon green watercolor paper and housed in its original black painted frame with green painted fillet, newly conservation retrofitted with 'museum' uv-resistant plexiglass and acid-free mount. Work measures 19.5" by 12". According to provenance, Truex painted this as a gift to a friend; full provenance available upon request.

Van Day Truex (March 15, 1904 – April 24, 1979) was an important American designer, professor of design, painter, and a French Chevalier of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur). Van Day Truex was born in Kansas, the artistically inclined son of a stern and intolerant shop manager. After the seemingly obligatory stint living with a sympathetic and worldly aunt in Wisconsin, he escaped to New York City and design school (quite against his parents' wishes), turning in a stellar performance at the institution that would become Parsons School of Design and immediately earning the notoriously hard-won approval of none other than Frank Alvah Parsons, who eventually appointed him director of the Paris branch. Several hundred society introductions, garden parties, and black-and-white balls later, Truex found himself at the center of the international elite, one of the social register's most sought-after interior designers, not to mention one of the most prized dinner guests in New York and on the Riviera. As an enormously popular instructor at Parsons, and the school's president from 1942 to 1952, Truex influenced American interior design far beyond the rarefied circles of his friends and clients, the likes of which include Brooke Astor and Elsie de Wolfe, and as director of design at Tiffany & Co. from 1955 to 1962, Truex indeed helped define 20th-century upper-class taste, calling it "design judgment". According to Adam Lewis, author or "Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style", "Van Day Truex is widely regarded as the father of twentieth-century American design. Under his leadership, Parsons School of Design became the foremost school for interior design and fashion in the United States, and he influenced generations of students entering these fields. But his greatest legacy is his long reign as design director at Tiffany & Co., which he transformed into a model for unprecedented style and grace" and Albert Hadley, who wrote the books' forward , "No one influenced American interior design more than Van Day Truex".