Marie Hull "Yellow Hill" Oil Painting, ca. 1960
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APPRAISER:
Something tells me you're not from Boston.
GUEST:
No, I'm a transplant from the South. I came from Mississippi.
APPRAISER:
This is a painting by an artist named Marie Hull who's from Mississippi. Did you buy it down there and bring it up here?
GUEST:
We did. We were living in Jackson, and about 25 years ago my husband went to an estate sale that an art dealer was having. And he was selling some personal items and some artwork. And he bought this painting in a group of three.
APPRAISER:
So it's a package deal of three paintings by Marie Hull.
GUEST:
No, there were three different artists. And it was just this Marie Hull that he was really interested in, and he paid $1,500 for the three.
APPRAISER:
Well, what do you know about Marie Hull?
GUEST:
Well, she's something of an artist of note in Mississippi. She was there for 80-plus years, and she lived in Belhaven, which is a neighborhood in Jackson. My husband and I lived there, and she taught art lessons. And my husband's brother had taken some art lessons from her when he was very young.
APPRAISER:
I was surprised to see something so far from the South all the way up here in Boston that sort of escaped, because most of them don't, most of them are still there. She's a very local phenomenon. She was born not far from Jackson, in Summit in Mississippi. She went to New York. She studied in the Art Students League. She studied with artists like Daniel Garber, who was a Pennsylvania impressionist artist. She also went up to Colorado and studied with Robert Reed, another impressionist artist. Now, this painting is a little different. It's called "Yellow Hill." But you don't really see the hill, do you?
GUEST:
(laughing): No.
APPRAISER:
Yeah, it's really fairly abstract. You have to recall in the '50s, the big influences would be abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock or field painters like Mark Rothko. This was probably painted I would think somewhere in the later '50s, '60s, in that time. This work is oil on canvas. It's a nice painting, a good size.
GUEST:
I find it very nice-- harmonious colors, the nice greens.
APPRAISER:
Do you have it hanging?
GUEST:
We do, we have it in our living room.
APPRAISER:
Yeah, well, it's a very nice painting. Now, what's going on in the market today, people are much more interested in mid-century modernism than they are in the earlier, realistic impressionist styles. So her paintings have taken off, especially the ones that are the more modern and abstract pieces. So if this had been a painting of just some flowers, you might have been around $2,000. But because of this being a modernist style, I would suggest at this point we'd probably have an auction estimate of about $10,000 to $15,000.
GUEST:
Oh, great! Great, my husband will be very pleased.
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