Auction Sale in Clinton Hall, New York, 1876
Ignacio de León y Escosura Spanish
Not on view
Escosura, a Paris-based genre painter, arrived in the United States in autumn 1876 to visit the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia and to work in New York for a few months. His ambitious canvas depicts a sale of decorative objects at Clinton Hall (once located at Astor Place), although it is not possible to identify the specific auction. Escosura, himself a voracious collector, introduced multiple narrative threads in the work—from the bewhiskered auctioneers on the podium to the fashionably dressed clientele clutching catalogues to the inattentive man at lower right. The artist exhibited the painting in the Paris Salon of 1877 and later presented it to The Met, a gift brokered by art dealer and trustee Samuel P. Avery.