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Lot 34
Philip Little(1857-1942)Kingston Harbor in the Old Days
26 September – 7 October 2025, 12:00 EDT
Skinner Marlborough, MassachusettsSold for US$5,120 inc. premium
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Jelena James
Senior Specialist, Head of Sale
Claire Dettelbach
Cataloguer
Jewel Bernier
Cataloguer
Philip Little (1857-1942)
Kingston Harbor in the Old Days
signed and dated 'PHILIP LITTLE 1941' (lower left); titled by hand (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.6 cm)
Painted in 1941.
signed and dated 'PHILIP LITTLE 1941' (lower left); titled by hand (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.6 cm)
Painted in 1941.
Footnotes
N.B.
Philip Little was born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and moved to Salem in 1886. He was a neighbor and close friend of Frank W. Benson, with whom he had studied at the Museum School in Boston, and the two often took sketching trips together around New England. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Little was adamant about resisting the influence of European artistic movements, at least insofar as was possible, and he was one of the few artists of the time who did not study abroad in Europe. Despite this, he was a great admirer of the French Impressionists and it is difficult not to identify a good deal of Monet in his painting.
Little was not only a prominent artist in Salem, but also a valued civic and community leader; he served on the board of aldermen, the common council, and the health and school boards, and was the curator of Salem's Essex Institute (which merged with the Peabody Museum in 1992 to form the Peabody Essex Museum). He served on the Massachusetts National Guard from 1887-1901, earning the rank of major, and worked with the U.S. government to design camouflage patterns for warships.
Much of Little's output comprises impressionist, atmospheric depictions of New England's coasts and landscapes. The present work, however, depicts a location a bit farther from home: Kingston Harbor, Jamaica. Little produced a number of paintings and watercolors of Jamaica; it was while on a trip to Jamaica in 1903, in fact, that he first began to embrace painting as opposed to lithography, on which he had previously focused. He said that, in Jamaica, he 'seemed to awaken from a sort of sleep and began to see sunshine, as well as nature, in silhouette'. It is likely that the present work was painted on the basis of a sketch that Little made during his 1903 trip.