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Ernest Fiene(1894-1965)Harbor View of a Seaside Village
Sold for US$640 inc. premium
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Jelena James
Senior Specialist, Head of Sale

Claire Dettelbach
Cataloguer

Jewel Bernier
Cataloguer
Ernest Fiene (1894-1965)
signed 'Ernest Fiene' (lower right)
watercolor and pencil on Arches paper
sheet size 15 1/4 x 22 1/2 in. (38.7 x 57.2 cm)
Footnotes
N.B.
Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany, and moved to New York City in 1914. He studied at the National Academy of Design, the Beaux Arts Institute, and the Art Students League of New York, and held his first solo show in 1923 at the Whitney Studio Club. He worked out of a studio in Woodstock, New York, until 1928, and spent the following decades working in Paris, Florence, and New York. In 1933 he moved to Southbury, Connecticut, and began spending summers on Monhegan Island, Maine. This provided him with more inspiration to his paintings, adding harbor scenes, seascapes, and quiet landscapes into his output of urban scenes. Fiene's works are held in numerous museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The present work is a charming example of Fiene's crisp, modern precisionism. Rows of houses, delineated in clean lines and stark color contrasts, sit silently sentinel by the glassy water. The roiling, stormy grey sky lightens in the distance, suggesting that a storm has perhaps just passed through. There are no signs of human activity: the homes' lights are dark, the boats' sails are furled, and the beach is empty. There is an almost sketch-like quality to the work, with spots of white paper showing through, that resembles the watercolors of Andrew Wyeth (who also spent time on Monhegan Island). While many of Fiene's paintings address themes of modernism, urbanism, and labor, this quiet watercolor takes on a more bucolic subject. It was possibly painted during the late 1930s, after Fiene began spending time in Monhegan Island and producing more harbor scenes and seascapes.
























