1940s Vintage Burr Singer Portrait of a Man Painting

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An arresting portrait, very distinctive, immediately intriguing: he’s in his pajamas and dressing-gown. An intelligent, sensitive face belonging to someone … Read more An arresting portrait, very distinctive, immediately intriguing: he’s in his pajamas and dressing-gown. An intelligent, sensitive face belonging to someone poised on the cusp of middle age, the beard heavy as if he hasn’t shaved yet that day. Has he been ill, is he just back from the war? As with the best portraits, one is compelled to look, to look again, to wonder, and imagine. A beautiful work, very of its time and place: postwar Los Angeles. Oil on board 17″ x 23″, frame 21″ x 27″

Bernice Lee ("Burr") Singer (born St. Louis, Missouri 1912; died Los Angeles, California 1992) was an American artist who worked in Social Realism subject matter, principally in watercolor, oil paint, and lithography. Singer is noted as a painter of African Americans who "spent the entire 1930s painting African-Americans because she said that nobody was painting them realistically. Everything else was stereotypical, caricatures."
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