This winsome, wistful portrait of the wife of James Bowdoin III has an intriguing history. Painted while the Bowdoins were on diplomatic business in Paris by Boilly, one of the most popular French artists of the Napoleonic period, it surfaced on the art market at an estate sale in northern France in the summer of 1999. Despite its European pedigree, however, it appears that the painting is actually making a return trip to Maine. Her work hovers between representation and abstraction, between a scientifically accurate depiction of an individual species and graphically compelling rhythm of gestures reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism which was an important early influence.
Winters is one of the best known and most prolific painters and printmakers working today.
His earliest prints, of which Morula II is an example, depict quasi-abstract but recognizably organic shapes, such as eggs, cells, seeds or bubbling blastulas, adrift in an ambiguous space and apparently caught in the act of mutating. Over time his imagery has evolved from singular forms hinting at their private internal structure to complex, networked fields, abstract systems suggestive of both biology and technology.