Description:

William L'Engle
Florida, Massachusetts, New York, (1884 - 1957)
Circus Family, 1953
watercolor on paper
signed and dated lower right with an abstract painting on the verso.

Excerpt from an askART Biography: Bill attended Yale University and graduated in 1906 with a degree in naval architecture and was noted among his classmates for his skill as a draughtsman. He was also a star on the track team and held the mile record. After graduation, he inclined to the fine arts and attended the Art Students League in New York City. He then sought further artistic training in Paris. There, he spent five years studying at The Academie Julian with Richard E. Miller (1875-1943) and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Jean Paul Laurens (1838-1924), and Louis Francois Biloul (1874-1947).

In 1910, accompanied by friends and fellow artists Waldo Pierce (1884-1970), and George Biddle, (1885-1973), L'Engle traveled to Madrid, Spain. The young artists studied there and spent time at the Prado Museum copying paintings by the Spanish artist, Diego Velázquez.

In 1914, William met the artist Lucy Stelle Brown, who had recently arrived in Paris at the Academie Julian. Soon thereafter, they were engaged and married.

The couple's first daughter, Madeleine, was born in Marseilles in 1915 during the family's forced return to New York City due to the outbreak of WWI in France. They visited Provincetown in the summer of 1916 where Lucy continued to study at Hawthorne's Cape Cod School of Art. Their second daughter, Camille, was born in New York in 1917.

The years 1916-1917 have become known as the "Cultural Moment" in America due to a "new" way of seeing, writing, painting and the new music, Jazz. William frequently took his subjects from the world of entertainment: dancers, acrobats, trapeze artists, wrestlers, and baseball players appear repeatedly in his work. He was greatly interested in the body in motion and in representing it solely by means of line. Dancers were a recurrent theme in the L'Engles' art during the Twenties and Thirties.

  • Dimensions: 20"H x 14"W
  • Medium: watercolor on paper

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