Signed lower right, 'Layton', for Gray Layton (American, 20th century) and created circa 1965. An exuberant and brilliantly colored, Post Impressionist collaged still-life painting comprising a bouquet of lilac blossoms, shown informally arranged in a patterned vase and set beside a jade glass bottle of absinthe and a ripe, yellow Boscobel pear, all contrasted against a background of scumbled and stippled rectangular elements in muted tones of ochre, violet and amethyst. Gray Layton first studied with Elizabeth Hazeltine at the University of Chicago and George Dutch at Peabody College. She furthered her training with Eliot O'Hara before studying watercolor with William Hollingsworth in Jackson. Layton was a member of the Mississippi Art Association and exhibited widely and with success, including at New Orleans' Delgado Museum, the Brooks Gallery in Memphis, the Southern States Art League and at the Municipal Art Gallery in Jackson among others. We are pleased to offer a stunning painted collage by this early Southern Modernist.