Beverlee

1941
Simboli-McFadden Collection

Oil on Canvas      29.5" x 35.5"        Signed 'Ray Simboli' (lower left corner)     Inv 1001

Painted around 1941, this is a portrait of Raymond and Mabel Simboli's fourth and youngest child, daughter Beverlee, who is four years old in this painting.

Raymond Simboli was a well established artist in the Pittsburgh area when he painted this, and one of the senior staff on the faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he had taught since 1920. While this is a fine example of Simboli's figurative portraiture, there is evidence of his increasing influence from Cubism in this period. While many of Simboli's early paintings had been concerned primarily with the visual appearance of his subjects,  works contemporary to this were beginning to depart from this figurative realism. This was particularly evident in his watercolors of the same period, which featured increasingly descriptive brushwork, formal exploration, and stylistic freedom. In Beverlee the developments which Simboli was exploring in these smaller watercolor works are now transposed into a large scale oil work. The increased freedom of the brushwork in this portrait, as well as the greater concern with the coloration and tactility of textures, and the flattening of the composition anticipates the increasingly fractured and deconstructed nature of Simboli's mature works, and his exploration with abstraction. Comparison of this portrait to subsequent portraits of Beverlee at the close of the decade are informative of the stylistic changes which are evident here.

Beverlee Tito Simboli now resides in Berkeley with her husband Daniel McFadden, who is a Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and the year 2000 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Beverlee is one of several of Ray Simboli's descendants who have inherited his artistic ability, and is an accomplished photographer who has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay area; her commissioned works are displayed in a  number of corporate and public spaces.