Preparatory sketch for 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 Susanna and the Elders is her imaginative twist on the Old Testament story. Sharrer made eighteen compositional sketches for this work; done in ink, pencil, crayon and casein, these preparatory drawings range from her initial cursory outline of the idea to color studies.
Ink
8 x 5 1/2 in. (20.3 x 14 cm)
Gift of Adam Zagorin and Perez Zagorin
2012.16.2
Photo: Elizabeth Mann