Signed l.r.
Pastel on paper
9¾ x 13 inches

Provenance
Estate of the artist
Kraushaar Galleries, New York
George F. & Rhonie H. Berlinger, New York
Private collection, New York

Exhibition
Fort Worth, Texas, Fort Worth Art Museum, n.d

In 1923 Glackens created The Dream Ride (Collection of Mrs. Patricia Arden, New York), a large, imaginative “dream” picture of Lenna [his daughter] mounted on Spit Fire, her hobbyhorse, against a fanciful landscape background with a carriage and a red house with a violet roof. The painting is derived from one of Lenna’s crayon drawings based on her toys (Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale) and on stories that father and daughter made up. The hobbyhorse had belonged to her aunt, Irene Dimock, and Lenna had played with it whenever the family visited the Dimock house in West Hartford. After the house was torn down, Spit Fire was moved to New York, with new ears attached, made from leather gloves. The decorative and somewhat flattened, surreal effect, unique in Glackens’ oeuvre, may owe something to the Post-Impressionist work of Maurice Prendergast and perhaps also to the panels depicting exotic figures and animals painted by Maurice’s brother, Charles.

- Excerpted from Dr. William H. Gerdts, William Glackens (New York: Abbeville Press and Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, 1996), pp. 123-25.