Notes from the Permanent Collection

Notes from the Permanent Collection – “Fish and Roses (a.k.a. Fish and Roses to My Darling”

By Emily Jones, Archivist

Bouché, Louis (1896-1969), Fish and Roses (a.k.a. Fish and Roses to My Darling), 1921-1923, oil on canvas board, Collection of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Gift of Olin Dows, 1973-07-04

One of the works currently on display in the Nature Morte exhibition in the Towbin Wing is Louis Bouché’s painting “Fish and Roses (a.k.a. Fish and Roses to My Darling)”, 1921-23. The painting was gifted by local artist Olin Dows to the WAAM Permanent Collection in 1973. According to a 1937 Esquire magazine article on Bouché, the painting was supposedly done as a panel for an overmantel in the Woodstock house of painter Robert Chanler. The book Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic (Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and The Monacelli Press, 2016) notes that while Rudolph Guertler worked as the foreman at Chanler Studios he shared studio space and worked with Louis Bouché on Ninth Street. That catalog also includes a group photograph including Chanler and Bouché, taken in about 1925 in front of Chanler’s house in Woodstock. It is unknown how Chanler and Bouché met, though the Guertler connection seems a possibility. It is also unknown when Dows acquired “Fish and Roses” (and from whom), but at the time of the Kraushaar Galleries memorial exhibition for Bouche in 1970, Dows had the work on loan to the (then-known as) National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum). The exhibition Nature Morte: The Early Years of Still Life Painting in Woodstock, curated by Donn Mosenfelder, is on display in the Towbin Museum Wing until August 19^th.

Emily Jones, Archivist

https://www.hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/waam/id/260/rec/5