We just toured Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC for the second time. The first time was maybe 40 years ago. It is incredible, absolutely spectacular. Worth the visit if you get a chance.
How's this for a quarry renovation?
Posted on 08/30/2023 6:30:38 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Thrift stores can be great places to find budget-friendly large frames. But a trip to a Savers location in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 2017 yielded much more for one bargain hunter, with a $4 painting now estimated to be worth as much as $250,000.
According to Bonhams auction house, the artwork was actually an oil panel illustration by the artist Newell Convers Wyeth, father of the more-famous Andrew Wyeth. The painting was one of four cover illustrations for a 1939 edition of the Helen Hunt Jackson novel Ramona.
The dramatic scene portrays the novel’s title character—a half-Scottish, half–Native American orphan living in Southern California after the Mexican-American War—”and her rigid and overbearing foster mother, Señora Moreno.” The book was originally published in 1884.
Related Articles An older gentleman in an olive blazer, blue shirt, and dark pants poses with his hands in the pockets of his pants next to a collage-style painting. Auctioneer Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr Dies at 84, Tracey Emin Plans Margate Community Center, and More: Morning Links for August 22, 2023 Designer Paul Smith Sends Banksy to Auction, Prix Ars Electronica Winners Named, and More: Morning Links for June 20, 2023 The painting was signed by Wyeth in the upper left and in ink on a label affixed to the back of the frame. However, the thrift shopper did not find any initial information through a quick internet search, simply hung it up in their bedroom for several years, and eventually stored it in a closet.
In May of this year, the consigner posted some images of the painting online in a Facebook group called Things Found on Walls after taking the work out while cleaning. The consigner was quickly directed to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, which showcases the work of several artists in the Wyeth family, as well as conservator Lauren Lewis.
Lewis drove three hours to meet the painting’s owner in Portsmouth and view the work in person. Lewis’s level of excitement “was the first time the consignor realized it was actually legitimate and valuable,” according to Bonhams.
During Wyeth’s career, the American artist created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books, working for companies like Scribner’s and publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Monthly, and Ladies’ Home Journal.
The painting is believed to be most likely a gifted from the publishers Little, Brown and Company to an editor or to the estate of the author. The auction house has given the painting an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. It is scheduled to be auctioned on September 19 in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
I remember about fifty years ago when a man found a Winslow Homer painting in a junk store in Tulsa OK. The store owner thought the frame was worth more than the painting.
Stay overnight and go just down the road to tour the magnificent, extensive Longwood Gardens!
We just toured Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC for the second time. The first time was maybe 40 years ago. It is incredible, absolutely spectacular. Worth the visit if you get a chance.
How's this for a quarry renovation?
I was in a store several years back that had some of those Chinese factory oil paintings of an elephant in Africa. They weren’t all that bad! Every painting was almost the same with minor variations.
Years ago, RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT 1980s show with Jack Palance showed a factory artist in Hong Kong doing fairly large paintings. Same painting over and over and over. He had it down to where he could start and finish a painting in 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes!
These are the paintings you see pop up every fall at STARVING ARTIST SHOWS. I saw one huge painting there in 1985, of a hunting guide and a string of horses crossing a river.
I recognized that it came from a 1970 photo in Field And Stream magazine. I had that same magazine.
In truth they were better done than the paintings on velvet sold in Mexico back in the 1950s-1980s.
Think of his son Andrew and son-in-law Peter Hurd.
And grandson Jamie Wyeth.
Oh, my! Gorgeous!
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