Susanna and the Eldest
1981
Honoré Sharrer
American, born West Point, New York, 1920; died Charlottesville, Virginia, 2009
Throughout the entirety of her career, which spanned almost seventy-five years, Honoré Sharrer created timeless satires with such astonishing virtuosity, intelligence, and wit that she had the admiration of critics and painters even as realism was dismissed in favor of painterly abstraction. Her magnum opus, an ambitious and intricately-constructed polyptych entitled Tribute to the American Working People (1951), took her more than five years to complete. It has long since achieved icon status, even as the artist herself remained fairly obscure, working away from Manhattan in her studio in rural Scottsville, New York, outside Rochester, and creating at her own painstaking pace. Though she remained outside the mainstream, Sharrer was a worldly intellectual whose commitment to realism was anything but dogmatic. Her art reflected her deep feeling for Northern Renaissance painting, its craft and allegorical conceits, and a belief that nothing engaged the imagination like familiar things in unfamiliar situations.
Sharrer especially loved poking fun at female stereotypes, and this painting offers a twist on the story of Susanna and the Elders. In Sharrer’s re-imagining, the voluptuous Susanna is anything but demure; she is a temptress and fully in control of her own fate. She looks straight out at the viewer, her Mona Lisa gaze betraying nothing of her own feelings or desires. An odd assortment of objects appears in strange juxtapositions, as in a dream. A clever trompe l’oeil device (one of many) - a hook and dangling string on the right margin - suggests that a curtain has been pulled away and we have magically entered into an alternative universe where everything is familiar but nothing is as it should be.
Oil on canvas
41 x 30 in. (104.1 x 76.2 cm)
Frame: 41 3/8 × 31 3/8 × 1 1/2 in. (105.1 × 79.7 × 3.8 cm)
Gift of Adam Zagorin and Perez Zagorin
2012.16.1
Provenance: The artist, Rochester, New York, and Charlottesville, Virgnia; [Spanierman Gallery, New York, 2002]; estate of the artist, through her husband, Perez Zagorin (1920-2009), Charlottesville, Virginia, and her son, Adam Zagorin, Washington, D.C.
Photo: Elizabeth Mann
