Collections record Beta

Oil Painting - Jean Lancaster (1917-1966)

2022-39-1

Full length portrait, oil on canvas. Sitter is a young girl with mid-length hair, wearing a yellow dress, and facing forward. She is seated on a bench or day bed covered with a green, floral print fabric; a green pillow to her right. Her left hand is holding a round fish bowl containing one goldfish. Background is light tan with green hues. Signed in lower-right, "A. Sheldon Pennoyer 1923." Framed in wood frame with raised floral decoration in corners, painted gold.

Jean Lancaster grew up in Litchfield, and later split her time between New York and Connecticut. According to the family, her mother commissioned Pennoyer to paint the portrait, and Jean would stop at Westleigh Inn on the way home from school to sit for the painting.

Albert Sheldon Pennoyer was born in Oakland, California, on April 5, 1888. He studied briefly at the University of California moving to Paris in 1912 to study architecture. The following year he gave up architecture and instead took up painting and studied at the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grand Chaumiére. He returned to the United States at the onset of World War I, and served from 1917 to 1920 in the camouflage unit of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then from 1920 to 1928 in the Officers’ Reserve Corp. In 1921, Pennoyer set up a studio in New York City where he would work at regular intervals for the next thirty-eight years. Pennoyer also spent large amounts of time at his mother’s home in Litchfield, producing Connecticut landscapes in pastel and oil and multiple scenes of Litchfield, both past and present. Pennoyer served again in World War II, first with the U.S. Army Air Force and the Corps of Engineers before joining the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA, better known as the Monuments Men). Given a Leica camera, a car, and a driver, Pennoyer was involved in the repair, recovery, and documentation of cultural heritage in Italy from 1943-1945. Pennoyer assisted in the recovery and return of artwork evacuated from public collections by Italian officials and storage in safer repositories in the Tuscan countryside. His photographs document the work of the MFAA, the destruction of monuments and buildings caused by German occupation and allied bombing, and the physical and emotional toll felt by the residents.

• Pennoyer, Albert Sheldon, 1887-1957

1923

Framed: 44" h x 34.25" w; Work: 39.5" h x 29.625" w

• canvas
• oil paint
• wood