Jerusalem

ARTHUR TIMOTHY (B. 1957)  

Jerusalem  

signed with the artist's initials and dated 'ABT 21' (lower right); signed again twice, titled and dated again ''JERUSALEM' 2021 A. B. TIMOTHY Arthur Timothy' (on the reverse)  

oil on canvas  

39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches (100 x 100 cm)  

Executed in 2021.

PROVENANCE:  

Private collection, New York

NOTES:  

Born in 1957 in Ghana and raised between Ghana and Sierra Leone, Arthur Timothy is a contemporary painter whose richly atmospheric portraits and narrative scenes explore memory, migration, family history, and the cultural hybridity of the African Atlantic world. Before turning fully to painting in 2018, Timothy worked for decades as a RIBA-chartered architect, a background that continues to inform the structural precision and compositional balance of his canvases. Drawing extensively from family photographs and personal archives, the artist creates works that reclaim and celebrate histories of Black elegance, intellectualism, and social ritual often omitted from dominant historical narratives. His paintings are distinguished by their luminous color, psychological intimacy, and careful attention to gesture, posture, and dress.

In Jerusalem, three Black men in immaculate formal dress – top hats, morning coats, pocket squares and white gloves in hand – stand against a softly rendered natural landscape composed of rich atmospheric washes of color. Timothy draws from a familial archive rooted in his home countries of Ghana and Sierra Leone, and these figures carry that history in their bearing. Their sartorial precision speaks to a particular tradition within late colonial and postcolonial culture, in which the intelligentsia of the African Atlantic dressed impeccably as an assertion of equivalence; a direct counter-narrative to colonial projections of African inferiority, delivered unapologetically.

What distinguishes Timothy’s work is the intimacy of his gaze. Rather than aestheticizing his subjects from a distance, he paints them with familiarity, warmth, and reverence, emphasizing the complexity and cultural richness of Afro-Caribbean diasporic life. The figures in Jerusalem possess both individuality and symbolic resonance, occupying a space between portraiture and historical reconstruction. Timothy’s architectural training remains evident throughout the composition, where spatial clarity and formal balance heighten the emotional restraint and quiet authority of the scene.

Timothy’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in several significant institutional and private collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and the Dean Collection. Since transitioning fully into painting, he has gained widespread recognition for his nuanced reimagining of Black diasporic histories through portraiture rooted equally in memory, elegance, and lived experience.