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William Matthew Prior, only known self portrait

William Matthew Prior, only known self portrait

Portraits are everywhere at auction, some beautifully executed while some lead to serious questions about the artist’s abilities (or the sitter’s appearance), but they can be a “hard sell.”  While not everyone may want what auctioneers sometimes call “instant ancestors,” at one time, portraits were a mark of status.  As the American middle class began to emerge during the Victorian era, portraits became one of those marks of respectability that upwardly-mobile families sought to possess, and in the days before the daguerreotype was widely available and widely affordable, portraits were very desirable and in considerable demand.

William Matthew Prior, son of a Bath, Maine shipmaster, is one of a number of portrait artists who found their fortune, or at least their living, painting quick, affordable likenesses for a demanding patronage.  Prior’s portraits, mostly unsigned, are characterized by a flatness with simplistically-outlined figures and little or no background decoration. This distinctive style had the added practicality of being quick and thus cost effective.  He actually advertised that he could create a credible likeness in just one hour. (For more information read our entire reference note on Prior here.) Prior made his way down the New England coast to Boston, where he settled in 1839 and remained, busily painting portraits until his death in 1873.  He continues to confound scholars today as many of his works are unsigned and his style varies greatly, likely based on how much money and time he was expecting from a commission.  As a result, many similar works have been attributed to the Prior-Hamblen School (Sturtevant Hamblen was another portrait artist and Prior’s brother-in-law), an attribution that must always be closely questioned because of the potential profit associated with linking a portrait to the Prior name.  Prior’s self-portrait, pictured above, was a recent auction offering (sold at Keno Auctions), and another piece in the puzzle to learning about this enigmatic man.

William Matthew Prior oil painting, Portrait of a Young Boy

William Matthew Prior oil painting, Portrait of a Young Boy

Prior, like many other artists of the era, often, as necessity demanded, took his talents on the road.  Itinerant portrait artists were common in early America, particularly throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they would travel from one small town to another, staying long enough to rent a room for a few days, spending some change to place an ad in the local newspaper, and then moving on again as business began to slow.  This constant movement over what were sometimes large regions when coupled with the fact that many portraits weren’t signed makes it challenging for historians to draw connections between works.  As with many works of art, attributions and connections can be made by experts on the basis of technical aspects like brushstrokes, canvas size, and stretcher construction, in addition to the small additions an artist might routinely use – a certain type of flower or a particular item in the background.  In some cases, even though the artist isn’t known, scholars have been able to identify enough similarities to create a body of work and a nickname for the unknown limner.  “Limner” comes from the Latin word luminare meaning to illuminate by way of the Middle English limnen which refers to the art of illuminated manuscripts, thus coming to mean painting or decorating and then the untrained itinerant artists who turned their skills to everything from portrait painting to sign painting to furniture decorating.  The New England art landscape is littered with unidentified limners like the Denison Limner and the Sherman Limner, artists who have a known body of work and several possible identities.  These little puzzles are what make the antiques marketplace so interesting, as new pieces are always being discovered and fitted together!

-Hollie Davis, Editor, p4A.com

Richard B. Gruelle watercolor painting, spring landscape with trees

Richard B. Gruelle watercolor painting, spring landscape with trees

Jacksons Auction & Real Estate Company conducted a Works on Paper art auction in Indianapolis, Indiana on April 11, 2010. The sale featured 176 cataloged lots, with a focus on Indiana artists. A 10% buyer’s premium was charged.

The auction house, which specializes in Indiana art, drew a considerably smaller crowd than usual, with about 35 bidders on the floor. Some absentee and phone bids also came into play. Prices were strong for the top lots, which included two record auction prices. However, interest was limited among the variety of the middle-tier and lower-end works.

An 1896 spring landscape painting by Richard Buckner Gruelle (pictured above), a member of the Hoosier Group brought a record price for a Gruelle watercolor. A Wayman Adams watercolor of a New Orleans couple is also believed to have set a record price, Bryon Jackson said.

p4A.com contributing editor Don Johnson

DeLaval Cream Separators 1915 calendar with illustration of farm boy feeding calvesCalendars are on sale everywhere this time of year: desktop calendars, day calendars, wall calendars, all with majestic photos or office jokes or beer-of-the-day recommendations.  We mark them up and tear them up, not paying much attention to the art work surrounding them, but a century ago, some of the finest American artists, household names today, were plugging away as illustrators, taking commissions to create beautiful images for display above calendars.

Advances in printing and manufacturing allowed for an explosion of advertising material starting in the late 1800s, and by the early 20th century, companies were giving away all manner of things, including wall calendars.  Companies like Coca-Cola capitalized on the fresh-faced “It” girl images, DeLaval Cream Separators went in for pastoral barnyard scenes like the one pictured here, while firearms-related businesses like Winchester and the Peters Cartridge Company cranked out dramatic depictions of hunters in the field.

If these images sometimes look like illustrations for novels, that’s not a coincidence.  For the first time, artists found they could support themselves financially, and hopefully find enough free time to pursue their own visions, by taking commercial illustration jobs, and they worked on advertising calendars as well as books.  Legions of great American artists benefited from this newfound source of income, and as a result, today’s collectors not only search out advertising calendars from specific companies, but from specific artists as well.  For example, this Winchester calendar was done by A.B. Frost, who worked as a painter, illustrator, and cartoonist, while Edmund Osthaus (see our reference note on him here) did work like this calendar for DuPont; Osthaus’s calendar illustrations occasionally bring almost as much as his sporting art paintings!  Even Norman Rockwell did calendar illustrations, so who knows what future artist may be creating the images for your desk calendar?

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

I was amazed the first time I encountered a book with fore-edge painting, a delicate and intricate little scene laid out across the edges of pages, usually visible only when the book is closed.

Fore-edge painting on Alfred Lord Tennysons In Memoriam

Fore-edge painting on Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam

This art is centuries old, and it actually appears in a variety of forms.  In some cases, the painting is only on one side, while in others, all three sides of the page edges are decorated, as is the case with this copy of the Bible.  Obviously, as with most art, the more complex works are the more valuable, and thus, collectors are especially fond of volumes with fore-edge paintings that are visible only when the pages are fanned a certain way.  Some books even have three separate paintings on the same edge – one visible when the pages are fanned slightly to the right, one when fanned to the left and a separate image when viewed directly!  Oddly enough, the images infrequently correspond to the book’s subject or genre – landscapes (like the one pictured above from a Tennyson volume) show up on works of poetry and works of science equally.  For more information, you can always pick up a copy of Carl Weber’s Fore-Edge Painting: A Historical Survey of a Curious Art in Book Decoration – also in our database!

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

Andrew Wyeth painting, Frozen Mill Race at Chadds Ford with Wyeths Dog, Nell Gwyn

Andrew Wyeth painting, Frozen Mill Race at Chadd's Ford with Wyeth's Dog, Nell Gwyn

Offered at Northeast Auction‘s New Hampshire Fall Auction on October 25, 2009 are two watercolor paintings by American realist painter Andrew Wyeth. The first, Frozen Mill Race at Chadd’s Ford, depicts Wyeth’s yellow Labrador Retriever Nell Gwyn. It’s carries an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. The second a shoreline scene, Off Caldwell’s Island, is estimated at $100,000 to $200,000. Both paintings are part of the Collection of Margaret Scott Carter & Winthrop L. Carter.

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