Lot 129
David Howard Hitchcock(1861-1943)Untitled (Burning Lake, Hawaii) 18 1/8 x 36 1/4in framed 31 1/4 x 49 3/8in
3 August 2021, 13:00 PDT
Los AngelesSold for US$115,312.50 inc. premium
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David Howard Hitchcock (1861-1943)
Untitled (Burning Lake, Hawaii)
signed 'D. HOWARD HITCHCOCK 1891' (lower right)
oil on canvas
18 1/8 x 36 1/4in
framed 31 1/4 x 49 3/8in
Painted in 1891.
signed 'D. HOWARD HITCHCOCK 1891' (lower right)
oil on canvas
18 1/8 x 36 1/4in
framed 31 1/4 x 49 3/8in
Painted in 1891.
Footnotes
Provenance
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Paterson Rithet (nee Elizabeth Jane Hannay Munro), Victoria, British Columbia.
Present owner, gifted from the above, 1946.
Robert Paterson Rithet (1844-1919) was a Scottish businessman who apprenticed in the Liverpool mercantile trade as a young adult. He emigrated to Victoria, British Columbia in 1862, where he prospected for gold in the Cariboo Gold Rush. As a merchant, he frequently traveled between San Francisco and Victoria. Over the next few decades, Rithet diversified his investments, acquiring real estate managing commodities such as salmon, cattle, iron, and flour. By the late 1880s, Rithet operated the largest merchant firm in British Columbia and was active in Victoria's social and civic life, serving as a one-time mayor and legislator.
In the 1890s, Rithet began to travel to Hawaii to manage his business partner's sugar interests. The nativist McKinley Tariff of 1890 levied a significant import tax on sugar which devastated the Hawaiian economy. In 1897, capitalizing on Hawaiian sugar growers' support of American annexation (as a means to end the import tax) Rithet worked with individual planters to organize the California and Hawaiian Sugar Refining Company in Crockett, California, becoming its first president. The refinery was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt that same year as a cooperative in direct competition to The Spreckels Sugar Company monopoly.
The present work was received as a gift from a captain of a shipping line operating between San Francisco, Honolulu and Victoria at the turn of the century. It hung in the Rithet's home, Hollybank, until 1946.