Honoré Sharrer
Born 1920, West Point, New York
Died 2009, Washington, D.C.
1937-39 Yale University
1940-41 California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco
Selected museum exhibitions: Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2017); Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2007); Memorial Gallery, Rochester, New York (1987); American Federation of Arts, New York (1971); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1951); Museum of Modern Art (1946)
Selected honors: Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Arts, National Women’s Caucus for Art (1987); Childe Hassam Purchase Prize, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1978); Norman Waite Harris Medal and Prize, Art Institute of Chicago (1951); Woman Artist of the Year, Mademoiselle magazine (1949)
Selected public collections: Danforth Museum, Massachusetts; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Smith College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville
Achieving success at an early age, Honoré Sharrer was included in the landmark 1946 exhibition Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art. She developed a meticulously detailed figurative style that poet John Ashbery characterized as “a collaboration between Norman Rockwell and the brothers van Eyck." Exemplifying this intensity of detail, brilliant colors, and uncanny juxtapositions of objects within a distorted space, Still Life with White Pail is a stellar example of Sharrer’s magical realist painting.