$2,700
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Description
25" (64 cm.) x 25" painting. 32" x 32" framed. A portrait on rich black velvet stretched on board depicts a smiling young Shirley Temple, with particular attention to gleaming highlights of hair and having decorative blue hair bow to match her blue collar. In bamboo-themed gilt wooden frame, the painting is signed Leeteg. Edgar Leeteg, who spent most of his artistic years in Tahiti, perfected the art of rich painting on velvet, with the people and environment of Polynesia his main subject. In the mid-1930s some of his paintings were displayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu and it is likely at that hotel, which was the home of the Temple family on their Hawaiian trips, that he became familiar with the young actress whose portrait he painted and then preserved in his own archives. In 1946 Leeteg became acquainted with Charles Black, and upon the subsequent marriage of Shirley Temple and Charles Black, he gave this painting to them as a wedding gift.