Gregory Perillo Signed Oil Painting, Apache Child Portrait "Joe Biggs"

Gregory Perillo (American, active XX century). "Joe Biggs" or "George Biggs (Apache)" oil on canvas, n.d. Signed at lower right and titled on verso. An oil on canvas portrait of a young Native American child, identified on the verso as Apache, shown bust-length against a softly mottled ground of cream and smoke gray. A crimson headband holds back a tumble of long dark hair. The child's lower lip is pushed out in a sulk that any parent will recognize, and the wide brown eyes glance warily off to the side. The jacket is painted in warm ochre and umber, with three flower-like rosette buttons down the front. Perillo models the face in glowing flesh tones and leaves the background loose and atmospheric. This keeps attention on the child's expression, which is the heart of his celebrated child portraits. The painting is signed "Perillo" at lower right. It sits in a wood frame with a red burlap liner and a gilt inner fillet. Few careers in American art began with a grocery bag and a cup of coffee. Gregory Perillo was born in Greenwich Village to Italian immigrant parents and raised on Staten Island from the age of two. He grew up in Depression-era poverty so thorough that his first canvases were paper bags his mother ironed flat, and his first medium, by his own account, was coffee. The West reached him secondhand, through his father, an immigrant who studied the history of his adopted country and passed its legends to his son. The boy's true academy was the American Museum of Natural History. There he haunted the Native American halls and pored over the masters of Western painting. (The museum's African dioramas, fittingly, carry painted backgrounds by William Robinson Leigh, the man who would become his teacher.) Perillo served in the Navy at the close of the Second World War. Afterward he worked in a garment factory by day, earned his diploma by night, and used the GI Bill to train at the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and the Art Students League. The decisive lesson came by chance. On a 1950 trip to Arizona, Perillo met Leigh, then in his eighties and among the last living links to the generation of Remington and Russell. The encounter ripened into something close to a father-son bond. Perillo studied in Leigh's New York studio until the elder painter's death in 1955, and he is described as Leigh's only known private pupil. From that inheritance came a lifelong habit of fieldwork: repeated journeys to Native American communities to sketch, to observe, and to gather the particulars of dress, horse, and terrain that anchor his canvases. Perillo worked within the romantic tradition of the Western masters. He favored the noble profile, the solitary rider, and the mustang herd in full flight over documentary austerity. His range was wide, from miniature canvases to murals, and from the 1970s onward from small sculpture to monumental bronze. In 1976 he became a plate artist, and the reproductions that followed (collector plates, figurines, lithographs, and later giclee editions) carried his imagery off the gallery wall and onto the china cabinet shelf. His public work on Staten Island includes "The Rescue," a September 11 tribute honoring firefighter Joseph Maffeo at Staten Island University Hospital. He was generous with his time as well as his brush. He supported New York City public schools, the Boy Scouts of America, the American Parkinson Disease Association, and September 11 charities, among other causes, honoring his father's instruction to give back once success arrived. In 2017 he and his wife, Mary, moved to Clearwater, Florida. He was still painting every day the following year, and he died there in March 2021, survived by Mary, his wife of seventy-three years. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 205971

Estimate:$300

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