Dinner Table, 1983
Oil painting on canvas. Framed.
50 x 54 inches | 127 x 137.2 cm
Provenance: Private collection, Stanford California, acquired from the artist
Newly acquired, this large painting by the Southwest artist Susan Hertel is in fine condition. Hertel was an American artist, poet, and muralist known for her intimate paintings of ranch life in California and New Mexico, and her interior domestic scenes. She studied art at Scripps College and at the Kann Art Institute in Los Angeles. For nearly 30 years, Hertel was a chief designer and muralist working in collaboration with Millard Sheets, and her large-scale public artworks were featured in banks, libraries, hospitals, and churches across the United States. In 1980, Hertel relocated from California to a ranch in New Mexico, where she concentrated on painting her personal surroundings. She drew inspiration from what she called the magical qualities of everyday life, and her paintings radiate a sense of joy and serenity. Much of her work centers on quiet domestic or ranch scenes, often depicting her family and a menagerie of animals – horses, dogs, cats, and goats – that she raised on her ranches in Glendora, California, and Cerrillos, New Mexico. Her paintings of domestic scenes, such as Dinner Party, reveal her deep reverence for the artist Pierre Bonnard, with its patterning and flattened picture plane.
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