Diane Arbus
A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.

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© Estate of Diane Arbus

A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.
Image Not Available for A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.
ArtistAmerican, 1923–1971
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.
  • A family on the lawn one sunday in Westchester in June 1968.
  • from the portfolio A box of ten photographs
Date1968, printed later
Place depictedNew York, United States
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 15 1/8 × 15 1/8 in. (38.4 × 38.4 cm)
Sheet: 19 7/8 × 15 7/8 in. (50.5 × 40.3 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Gay Block in memory of Eric Alexander, by exchange
Object number2004.1524
Not on view

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Department
Photography
Object Type
Description


Diane Arbus’s honest and intimate photographs of people on the margins of society reveal what was extraordinary in the familiar and what was familiar in the extraordinary. Her portraits—straightforward in their technique, highly personal in their choice of subject, and collaborative in their approach— proved to be immediately and profoundly influential on subsequent photography. Already by November 1972, when a posthumous retrospective of Arbus’s work opened at the Museum of Modern Art, Robert Hughes declared in Time that her work “has had such an influence on other photographers that it is hard to remember how original it was.” The portfolio “a box of ten photographs,” conceived and assembled in 1969–71, is Arbus’s first and only distillation of her mature work, containing some of her most iconic images made between 1962 and 1970.



ProvenanceEstate of the artist; [consigned to Witkin Gallery, New York]; [purchased by Harry Lunn, 1972]; [purchased by Jo Tartt, Washington, D.C., late 1970s]; purchased by Gay Block, Houston, 1986; purchased by MFAH, 2004.
Exhibition History"Acquisitions of the Last Five Years: Selections of Modern and Contemporary Art," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 15–October 15, 2005.

"Always Greener: Seeing and Seeking Suburbia—Selections from the Museum’s Collection," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, August 21, 2018–February 3, 2019.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Printed back label with ink, verso upper right: title ... // date... // print by Neil Selkirk, 1973
Stamped on verso upper left: Not to be reproduced in any way without // written permission from Doon Arbus
Stamped on verso upper center: This print is part of a limited edition portfolio of // ten Diane Arbus photographs. 8/50
Marked in ink on the back label: Doon Arbus

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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Diane Arbus
1960, printed later
Gelatin silver print
99.580