This item is sold. It has been placed here in our online archives as a service for researchers and collectors.
 Full sheet |
 Signature |
Back of sheet
To see other works by de Menocal on our site, use our site search engine.
Watercolor still life painting of a pillow in a white pillowcase on what appears to be a bed with a black headboard. Typical of de Menocal's style, it is painted in a traditional realist style, but the subject matter diverges from typical still life fare. The pillow has a slight indentation of the imprint of a head, as if someone has just left the bed, and the sheen of the highlights makes it seem to glow against the muted and darker colors of the background.
De Menocal's still-life works in oil, painted from the 1960s to the 1980s, are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. His watercolors generally take a looser, less stylized approach; in contrast his oil paintings often exhibit crisply rendered forms and precise detail.
The Smithsonian Institution has the following online biography of the artist from the catalog of the Sara Roby Foundation collection:
De Menocal graduated from the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. During his early career he drew illustrations for Condé Nast publications, organized displays for the Lord and Taylor department store in New York City, and created costume designs for Radio City Music Hall. He had his first solo exhibition in 1951, and continued to show in this country even after moving to Brazil. In the 1960s de Menocal withdrew from the secular world and spent over a decade at the Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut, and later with the Trappists in Derryville, Virginia, and Spencer, Massachusetts. After leaving the monastery he settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and returned to painting. In the still life arrangements for which he is best known, de Menocal is concerned with quietude of mood and with formal issues of balance and tone.
Reference:
Mecklenburg, Virginia M.; Essay By William Kloss. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987. p. 48. Online at: http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.cfm?StartRow=1&ID=1205 (9 August 2006).