Ethel Robertson Gath, Neighbors, 1947

Neighbors is typical of the American Scene paintings for which Ethel Robertson Gath was best known. “I am never at a loss for subject matter,” she reflected. “I do not look for something to paint, nor do I feel that I have to ‘go away’ to find the right spot. I am surrounded with subject matter in my everyday life, waiting to be painted.”

Although Gath considered herself a realistic and conservative painter, her simplified, edited forms in Neighbors take on a modernist quality as buildings, hanging laundry, a car, and people all carefully composed with rakish foreshortened angles form well designed patterns of color, light and shadow, elevating the work beyond the typical genre scene of the period. Neighbors is an excellent example of Gath’s painting from the prime of her career when she consistently won awards, including at the Society of Washington Artists and the Washington DC Art Fair. A jury, which included Reginald Marsh, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Lamar Dodd, selected Ethel Robertson Gath’s Neighbors for The Woodward Award Fund prize at The Twenty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Southern States League at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1947.

Pre-1945

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Ethel Robertson Gath