18. Robert Reid Opal, c. 1895 Oil on canvas 72 x 36 inches

Robert Reid (1862-1929)
Opal, c. 1895
Oil on canvas
72 x 36 inches

Signed lower left: Robert Reid

Inscribed on stretcher bar: Robert Reid Opal presented to Arthur Perkins / 141 E 23rd Street ASA

Ex collections:

The artist to Arthur Perkins
Private collection, until the present

Exhibitions:

New York, Society of American Artists, 1897
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, "Sixty-seventh Annual Exhibition," January 10-February 22, 1898, no. 375
New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, "Robert Reid," one-man exhibition, April 1898
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., "Paintings by the Ten American Painters," March 15-27, 1915, no. 25

Literature:

"Ten American Painters," Exh. cat. New York, Spanierman Galleries, May 8-June 9, 1990, listed p. 183, no. 25 (in Knoedler exhibition of the Ten).

The subject of the opal, that iridescent, magical stone, was explored by several of the Ten in the years around the turn of the century. Tarbell painted The Opal in 1890, and Hassam exhibited his nude version of Opal with the Ten in 1905 and 1908. Reid was fascinated with these nacreous color schemes and executed Opal, his tour de force in this palette, which he promptly exhibited at the Society of American Artists in 1897. Its life-size scale and dazzling chromatic effect won much praise from critics and fellow artists. After its exhibition at Knoedler in New York in 1915, it disappeared into a private collection. It is now seen publicly for the first time since that pre-World War I showing.

Selected Contemporary Reviews and Literature:

New York Times, April 23, 1898, p. 270, c. 3 (Saturday Supplement):

"Robert Reid gave an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Galleries on Monday of some thirty-seven canvases, upon which he has been at work during the past few years. Some had already been seen at the Academy and other exhibitions in the city, but there were many that had never been shown publicly before, including a number of studies and sketches....It demonstrated very clearly Mr. Reid's claim to a place in the front rank of American artists, whose forte lies more in decorative. He is unquestionably a strong and facile draughtsman, and has a fine and refined color scheme...."The Opal," [is] a remarkably strong life-size nude study. The exhibition was largely attended by artists, and the general verdict passed upon it by Mr. Reid's fellow-workers with the brush was a highly favorable one."

The Critic, vol. 29 (1898): "Those German romanticists who worshipped the color blue would have felt at home among Mr. Robert Reid's paintings at the Durand Ruel galleries on Sunday and Monday last. Not that in all of them blue is the dominant note; but that Mr. Reid takes pleasure in accenting it whenever he finds it. The color of the distance, of heaven, of blue eyes and blue gingham, has a strong fascination for him;...Yet to our mind, his most charming color is in those pictures in which the blue is but an undertone, and in that happily named "Opal," a study of the nude in cross lights, from fire and window. The whites and flesh in this picture...are cool, delicate and harmonious to the unusual degree."

William Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville, 1984), p. 183:

"At about this time Reid also began to define his principal theme-attractive young women with flowers-in the first version of his Fleur-de-Lys of about 1896 (now lost). Opal a nude variant of this subject, was shown the following year at the Society [The Society of American Artists], and his work again was likened to the painting of Besnard."

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