Artwork Details
- Title
- The Barricade
- Artist
- Date
- 1958
- Location
- Not on view
- Dimensions
- 25 x 32 1⁄8 in. (63.4 x 81.6 cm.)
- Copyright
- © 1958, Wynn Chamberlain
- Credit Line
- Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- egg tempera on fiberboard
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Landscape
- Architecture Exterior — detail — fence
- Architecture Exterior — domestic — house
- Equestrian
- Object Number
- 1986.6.15
Artwork Description
Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, 2014
In the 1950s, Wynn Chamberlain used egg tempera paint to create highly detailed figural scenes that contrasted sharply with the abstract paintings popular in America at that time. Sara Roby, a patron of twentieth-century art, bought this painting because she believed that Chamberlain was a promising artist who should be encouraged (F. Manola to Lloyd Goodrich, September 24, 1958, SAAM curatorial file). The Sara Roby Foundation later gave this painting to the Smithsonian American Art Museum along with other works from Roby's collection. The medium of egg tempera demands hundreds of thousands of tiny brushstrokes placed closely together. Here, these dashes of paint conjure the effect of wind blowing down the hillside from the house to the ramshackle structures in the foreground. The arrangement of wood and netting evokes a defensive wall behind which a woman stands, as solid as the building behind her.