PROVENANCE:

The painting "Farmer's House" belongs to the artist's "New York Period". Judging from the picture's composition, it probably shows a scene from the Pelham Bay area in the northwestern Bronx. The same view, in particular the houses on the right, very likely also served as backdrop of another of Yun Gee's works, "Radio Street", "Pelham Bay", which features on page 53 of the 1998 exhibition catalogue "Yun Gee", published by the Lin & Keng Gallery.

Apart from "Radio Street, Pelham Bay", there are, according to current knowledge, three other oil paintings by Yun Gee depicting the same motif. There is the larger-format "Returning Home" (73.5 x 98.7cm), which previously appeared in a Nov. 1999 Christie's Taipei auction, and also featured in the 1995 Lin & Keng Gallery catalogue "Yun Gee" (pp. 66-67), although there the painting was titled "Farmer in the Wagon." Then we have the smaller "Country Landscape" (21.5 x 27cm), which is also included in the 1995 Lin & Keng Gallery catalogue (p. 77). And lastly, there is the present lot, "Farmer's Houses" (36 x 50cm), which was sold at a May 2005 Christie's Hong Kong auction.

Yun Gee loved and excelled at landscape paintings, and he would often visit New York's Central Park to sketch from life. The result were a number of paintings showing New York vistas throughout the changing seasons of the year: rowing boats on the park's lakes and ponds, riders on horseback, and other scenes of leisure and recreation frequently appear in these works. The smallest of the four pictures from the "Pelham Bay" series, "Country Landscape", shows a farmer pulling a horse cart between wooden fences, but both the man and the cart are only adumbrated with faint lines, giving the composition a somewhat unfinished feel. The larger-format one, "Returning Home" (also titled "Farmer in the Wagon") shows a farmer riding a horse cart, and this time the man's features and contours are executed in a much more detailed and complete manner, putting the painting's focus irmly on the figure instead of the surrounding scenery. "Farmers' House", on the other hand, is clearly a more poetic rendition of a bucolic panorama. In all likelihood it was completed during the same period that saw the creation of the other two paintings described above, that is between 1930 and 1940.