SOLD


Charles Mahoney:
Allegory of Paeon, circa 1930
Unmounted (ref: 5301)

Oil on paper, 13 1/2 x 16 in. (34.2 x 40.5 cm.)

Tags: Charles Mahoney oil flowers

Provenance: The Artist's Estate

Mahoney's furtive imagination was often inspired by Allegories which evolved around a staple of idiosyncratic motifs - the hand of the creator, fleeing figures, empty houses, the symbiotic relationship of man and  nature, (sometime as a personification, sometimes a metamorphosis), the Artist and his Muse.  This composition - showing a red peonie cut from the bush visible in the middle ground to the left - is likely to refer to the myth of Paeon, from whom the anem Peonies derives.  According to Greek myth Paeon was saved from the wrath of  Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, by the intervention of Zues who turned   Paeon into the peony flower.