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Ducks

Photo: Elizabeth Mann

Ducks

probably 1957

Mark Tobey

born Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890; died Basel, Switzerland, 1976

A charming token of affection between Mark Tobey and Robert Shields, this small sumi drawing, done by Tobey in 1957, has been lovingly mounted on silk and linen as a hanging scroll. It is a deeply personal piece and stylistically, one of Tobey’s most directly “Japanese” works in its presentation.

Robert Shields may have been known as “one of the Grand Old Men in Northwest architecture” (Pacific Northwest Magazine), but it is his enduring passion for art that leaves a lasting legacy at SAM. When Mr Shields passed away in the summer of 2012, he left his entire estate to the Seattle Art Museum, its value to be used in support of the Asian art program.

One of the foremost Northwest architects of the mid-20th century, Mr Shields graduated from the University of Washington with an architecture degree in 1941. After serving in the Navy in WWII, he returned to Seattle and founded the architecture firm Tucker, Shields and Terry in 1946. Over the course of the next 30 years he established a reputation as one of the foremost Northwest architects as he designed homes, commercial spaces, the KIRO-TV headquarters, and Canlis restaurant.

A champion of Northwest art and artists (he counted Zoe Dusanne, Don Foster, Morris Graves, and Kenneth Callahan among his friends), Mr Shields was also passionate about Asian and Native American art, as well as European decorative arts; and he collected in all of these areas. He was a member of the museum’s Asian Art Council, the Seattle Clay Club, and the Puget Sound Bonsai Society. In honor of the opening of SAM Downtown in 1991, he donated several Japanese objects and a Morris Graves painting to the collection.



Sumi ink on light weight Japanese paper, mounted on silk and linen as a hanging scroll
Sheet: 12 × 9 1/2in. (30.5 × 24.1cm)
Overall: 37 5/8 × 15in. (95.6 × 38.1cm); with knobs: 17 in. (43.2 cm)
Gift of the Estate of Robert M. Shields
2013.4.5
Provenance: Possibly the artist to the donor by gift
Photo: Elizabeth Mann
location
Not currently on view

Resources

Exhibition HistoryIthaca, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, JapanAmerica: Points of Contact, 1876-1970, Aug. 27-Dec. 18, 2016 (Sacramento, Crocker Art Museum, Feb. 12-May 27, 2017). No cat no., p.288, reproduced fig. 194.

Seattle Art Museum respectfully acknowledges that we are on Indigenous land, the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. We honor our ongoing connection to these communities past, present, and future.

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