A SMALL COLLECTION OF OIL PAINTINGS BY CHARLES MERRILL MOUNT (NEW YORK/IRELAND/WASHINGTON, D.C. 1928-1995)
The provenance for all of these paintings is from a sale by the artist to Mr. Fastov c. 1985. Mr. Fastov selected what he thought were the best of Mount’s paintings. Mount’s auction records are a mere handful and irrelevant to this sale, because these very few auctioned works were greatly inferior to the works Mr. Fastov purchased from Mount. The presale estimates are very reasonable, given Mount’s skill and bravura Impressionist painting technique and pastel coloring, which was a direct result of Mount’s early exposure to and close study of John Singer Sargent. See, e.g., especially Mount painting No. 1 (below)
Charles Merrill Mount was a very gifted and intelligent individual, but he unfortunately became a truly tragic figure. as is suggested by part of the biographical sketch below. Mount was very bright, articulate, an excellent raconteur and artist, who early in his career, earned very significant compensation for his portraits, and was an excellent biographer of important artists, as noted below. However, he could be very devious, sometimes paranoiac and was, at all times, a disputatious, confrontational individual, and by the 1970’s the art establishment had turned against him and put out the word, that he should not be hired to paint portrait commissions for wealthy and powerful institutions and individuals. By the time he reached Washington, he was in significant financial straits and could not obtain a portrait commission of any consequence. Francis Coleman Rosenberger, who served as a member of the legal and legislative staff, at the U.S. Senate (1942-78) and was attorney to the Committee on the Judiciary from 1955 to 1978, serving as chief counsel and staff director from 1976 to 1978, all under the auspices and control of the very powerful U.S. Senator from Mississippi, James Eastland. He and Mount had become friends.

When it came time for Eastland’s portrait to be painted for the U.S. Senate, Rosenberger, as a gesture of friendship, arranged to have Mount be commissioned to paint the portrait for a fee of a few thousand dollars. Rosenberger was motivated to get Mount the commission, because, as was usual with Mount, during his stay in the Washington, D.C. area, he was facing financial straits, in large part, because of the derogatory statements and charges placed against him, arising from his disputes with the art establishment. Ultimately, Mount pressed the University of Mississippi Foundation, which was supposed to raise the funds to pay for the portrait, for payment for the original portrait of Eastland, plus a smaller portrait of Eastland, that was to hang in University of Mississippi Law School. He ultimately claimed $13,450 for the two portraits, settled for a $5,000 payment, but then the Foundation did not pay him this promised sum, and ultimately gave Mount, in effect, a “take it or leave it offer, which it appears that he ultimately may have accepted a check for $3,000, after he sued the Foundation for payment. To publicize his lawsuit, Mount climbed on top of a table in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, and, per the Toledo Blade of May 17, 1979, “ gestured at the Eastland portrait” hanging there and worked himself into “what Mount called a ‘Shakespearean wrath, a great and searing moral indignation’” and sought to pressure Rosenberger by publicizing his position in the matter with his usual flamboyant manner, which earned coverage by Roger Mudd of the CBS TV network news program, in which, he was permitted to continue his rants again on national TV. Mount did not prevail in his litigation, but he almost destroyed a very caring kind man, who had gone out of his way to obtain the commission for Mount. Mount was one of the most litigious individuals Mr. Fastov has encountered. He became aware of Mount turning on former friends and suing them. In addition, as the reader can appreciate from the long list of Mount’s publications described above and the fact that he wrote in a stylish, quotable manner, that Mount’s statements in his publications were often quoted in other art publications. Mount used to read book reviews and other art publications to see whether he was being quoted. If he found that someone had quoted him, he would claim copyright infringement, and seek compensation. If Mount did not receive what he demanded, in most instances, he would draft and file a lawsuit, in propria persona or pro se and would continue to press the litigation, until what he considered adequate compensation. Mount told Mr. Fastov that he had threatened and filed many of these lawsuits with success. After Mount served his jail time for the crimes described in the Wikipedia article (below), he died a lonely broken man.
Note 1) The following Mount biographical materials are taken from the Wikipedia website:

“ Charles Merrill Mount (1928–1995) was an American artist. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928 as Sherman Merrill Suchow, he later changed his name and studied at the Art Students League of New York. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 and travelled to Europe where he worked in Italy, France, Britain and Ireland. He returned to the United States in 1969, and worked in New York and Washington, D.C. He specialized in portraits and also produced landscapes and streetscapes in oil and watercolor as well as charcoal drawings. He was interested in art history and published biographies of John Singer Sargent (1955), Gilbert Stuart (1964) and Claude Monet (1966). His career and personal life were marred by untreated bipolar disorder and a controversial later life, including a prison sentence for theft of rare documents. He died in 1995 in Washington, D.C. He is survived by five children from two marriages… Mount was arrested at Goodspeed's Book Shop in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1987, by the FBI for attempting to sell 158 Civil War documents to Claire Rochefort. These documents had been stolen from the National Archives and Records Administration. Mount was also in possession of additional letters stolen from both the Library of Congress and National Archives, in what is one of the largest rare documents thefts, with the value of the stolen items totalling over $100,000.
Mount was initially charged with two counts of interstate transportation of stolen property, with the first count on the Whistler letters from the Library of Congress and the Churchill and James letters from the National Archives. The second count covered 144 of the 158 Civil War documents Mount was attempting to sell to Rochefort. Because of excellent record-keeping by both institutions, including call slips and microfilm versions of the documents, Mount was convicted on March 30, 1989, and was sentenced to eight years in prison.[1]
Publications
1955. John Singer Sargent: A Biography. New York.
1963. The Irish career of Gilbert Stewart. Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, Vol. VI.
1964. Gilbert Stuart: A Biography. New York
1964. Carolus-Duran and the Development of Sargent, The ART Quarterly, Number 4.
1966. Monet, A Biography. New York.
1972-3. November 24, 1873, The Precise Moment of Impressionism: Claude Monet's “The Bridge at Argenteuil” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 71-2, p. 508-547.
1972-3. The Rabbit and the Boa Constrictor: John Singer Sargent at the White House. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 71-2, p. 618-656.
1973-4. The Works of John Singer Sargent in Washington. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 73-4, p. 443-492