American actress, model, and socialite (1943–1971) known as one of Andy Warhol's superstars and muse to Bob Dylan. Magnificent original watercolor painting of a white Arabian horse, accomplished by Edie Sedgwick on a white 7 x 8 sheet, trimmed and applied to a brown 9 x 9 mount, signed on the mount in ballpoint, "Edith Sedgwick, 1959." The gorgeous painting perfectly captures the beauty and elegance of the horse, exquisitely done by the teenage Sedgwick. Mounted and framed to an overall size of 13.75 x 17.75. In fine condition.
Sedgwick left the St. Timothy's School boarding school in 1959 and returned to her family’s La Laguna ranch in California. She remained there until she was sent to the private Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, in the fall of 1962. Her date notation of 1959 places her at the age of either 15 or 16 when this work was created. Sedgwick’s childhood on the ranch instilled in her a great love for animals of all sizes, from majestic horses to the smallest of woodland creatures.
Horses, as much of her artwork reveals, served as a creative anchoring point for Sedgwick throughout her life, a go-to subject from a childhood spent on California ranches. As a youth, she topped broomsticks with hand-made animal heads and she often enjoyed ‘playing horse,’ which her sister Suky described as: ‘You had to look at a picture and you would choose what you wanted to look like. Edie used to make me stare at the picture of a goddamn horse’s face for hours…She inevitably chose something that was very delicate and very Arab…always a beautiful prancing princess-type horse.’
According to her brother Jonathan Sedgwick: ‘When it came to real horses, Edie would always get the best-looking one. She could get anything she wanted. Spoiled. Even if I had the best-looking horse, it became her horse because she convinced everyone that I was too heavy for him and that he’d get tired under my weight. That was cool; it didn’t bother me. We were on top of horses at fourteen months. They’d prop us up on them for a picture to be taken, and then you’d keep wanting a horse. Everybody rode, and you just started riding the first thing you could…Edie and Suky rode at night, through the moonlight.’
