| This is a watercolor with a cut-out by Gloria Escoffery that was appraisted by the staff at Antiques Roadshow this summer at Tampa, FL. before hurricanes Katrina and Wilma hit. It is being sold for a non-profit group here in Miami, Temple Beth Or. It was donated to raise funds and is listed below the appraised value. Because of he extensive tree damage and roof leaks at Temple Beth Or, we need to raise funds so it is listed below the value by a considerable amount. The total amount of the sale will be donated to Beth Or so think of it not only as an investment but a tax deduction, too.
SOLD
None of Gloria Escoffery's work have been auctioned to date, or at least there is no record of such. This is titled Composition with Figures. The matte is not acid free and shows signs of foxing, I have contrasted the title so it would show up better. The actual print measures 18 inches by 20 inches. An image taken at Roadshow of yours truly with new Antiques Roadshow host, Mark Walberg.
This is your chance to own an art work that will increase in value in the coming years. The appraiser's comments were: "This work is truly lovely." She understood the complexities of it. Colleene Fesco was the appraiser who viewed it.
Obituary: Gloria Escoffery. Died July 24, 2002.
Copy from Studio International, googled Gloria Escoffery. The Jamaican painter, teacher, poet and art critic died in 2002, aged 78. She had been a major element in the Jamaican art movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Her work combined regional mythology, satire and social comment, with an individual symbolism of a figurative vein. Escoffery sprang from the developing Jamaican middle class, yet felt rooted in Jamaican rural society and folk culture. Her father, a doctor, descended from white Haitians who had left Haiti at the time of the oppressive revolution, and she numbered Jewish and English Jamaicans among her ancestors. This enabled her to stand apart as a thinker and critic from conventions, and yet be constructively productive in advancing regional self-imagery. She was the scholar from Jamaica to McGill University, Canada, in l942, and on her return was befriended by the Manley family, leaders of the People's National Party in pre-independence Kingston. She was made literary editor of their weekly journal, Public Opinion. From 1950 to 1952 she was a student at the Slade School of Art in London (at which Lucian Freud was then teaching). On returning she became one of the country's national realist group of painters. Gradually her work took on new influences and became more experimental. Her work was included in the watershed exhibition mounted in the Smithsonian Institution, Jamaican Art. Later on, she completed a major series of five panels, which drew upon her Middle Eastern roots. She maintained all her life an active involvement in the teaching fraternity, yet without ever losing her close affiliation to the rural Jamaica she knew and understood. Her own memorial she saw as the fulfilment of the Town cultural centre, centred around her own library of 1000 at books in the grounds of her house. She also published two collections of poetry, and is well received in her homeland and beyond.
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