The Boardwalk, Atlantic City, New Jersey by Peter Clapham Sheppard

Provenance:
Estate of the artist
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:
Tom Smart, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work, Richmond Hill, Ontario, 2018, reproduced page 137

A Toronto native, Peter Clapham Sheppard occupies a place in Canadian art history among a generation of artists that established a distinctively Canadian school of art. While the painter studied, sketched and exhibited alongside members of the Group of Seven, Sheppard found inspiration in more broad subject matter, including landscapes, portraits, still lifes, city and harbour scenes. Sheppard bore witness to the steady construction and urbanization that took place in Canadian and American cities during the first half of the twentieth century, which inspired much of his artistic oeuvre. In this regard, Sheppard saw himself as better aligned with the contemporaneous American society of artists known as the Eight, and later the Ashcan School. Members of these groups depicted the bustling streets of New York City in a colourful, expressive and anti-academic manner. Sheppard exemplifies this approach in many of his urban scenes of the early 1920s, including paintings of Toronto, Montreal, New York City, and in this instance, Atlantic City. The vibrant canvas “The Boardwalk, Atlantic City” (1922) embodies these anti-aesthetic intentions in its decorative colour palette and contemporary reflection of middle-class urban life. Author and art historian Tom Smart writes in his recent book on Sheppard that “[i]n artistic terms, Sheppard identified with human subjects in gritty urban settings.” Smart elaborates further on Sheppard’s talent in painting city scenes, remarking that he “captured an essential liveliness, apparently easily, gesture and rhythms of line and colour simulate as if by magic the cacophony and harmonies of his subjects.”

P.C. Sheppard was captivated by subjects involving a human presence, particularly crowds in city streets, markets, county fairs, circuses and harbour scenes. In many of these artworks, the artist illustrates the stark contrast between humans and the sublime landscape or the power of industrialization. Tom Smart comments on this theme present in “The Boardwalk, Atlantic City” and similar works of the early 1920s, remarking that Sheppard “explores the dichotomy between human-scaled objects and the almighty dehumanization of the modern city.” The author points out the “two-ranked composition in the boardwalk” of this vibrant canvas, and describes it as “a painting that recalls the ambitions of arrival of the circus with its heavily populated foreground overshadowed by an elevated avenue separating the maelstrom from the built structures looming over everything.”

A copy of “Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work”, the 2018 book devoted to the artist and within which this artwork is reproduced, is included with this lot.