Thoughts on age of this painting

better without the glare

 

Not sure what you mean by an original frame, but it strikes me as the only one with a frame that does anything to enhance the presentation of the painting.

 

I feel the frame looks 30s/40s. Looks about the right aged frame for the painting (could be older). When do you think the black frame was made?

 

We have one example that is

If 1916 - 1983 are this artist's life dates, he can have been no more than 15 when he painted an original so copied by others.

The way the examples we are finding are so prominently, legibly signed by an assortment of names suggests proud skilled amateurs to me.

 

Ah, meaning the frame & the painting look like contemporaries. Could be. That's well outside any area of competence of mine. Certainly the scrolly gold ones are in an earlier style, although may in fact be contemporary in manufacture.

 

It's a very odd thing.

Debora

 

Maybe it's an AI hallucination.

 

Good theory but not if it's real advertisements for versions that you can buy

 

I don't think I've ever seen a similar situation -- a painting that's so widely reproduced (without, of course, being a well-known work.) Do wonder if there was some commercial aspect to so many individual reproductions.

Debora

 

How about an art school in a big city that used this installation for many classes over the years.
Might help to make the teachers job easier to give feedback and tips

 

Yes, something like that.

Debora

 

Despite individual variation, you can see that they all derive from the same bunch of flowers & leaves. Can't imagine an art school being able to leave up, or regularly bring out, the exact same arrangement of flora, even artificial, & the cloth that makes an angle at the base. I can, however, imagine that they might have had a painting or print that students were assigned to copy. Not necessarily anything well known, just something that was a good exercise in color & texture. All those proud signatures - graduation piece?

 

the cloth on the table varies wildly in interpretation

 

because that's not the focus of the art work.......

 

The jugs are all blue, yet each is different. If yours were the only version I had seen, I would have guessed the flowers were sitting someplace like a stone paved courtyard. It does not look like fabric at all.

 

Wonder if this might have been an instructional example in an artist's how-to guide. Would explain multiple copies of the same subject. Didn't we recently have a thread where it turned out that an early painting by a famous artist was produced as a copy from a book? Can't remember the specifics but it was a similar situation where multiple paintings of the same subject were coming up.

 

Agree. Some sort of commercial connection.

Debora

 

Something like this ...

 

I showed chat gpt and Claude photos of the back.
They seem to think that the frame and the painting are late Victorian early Edwardian.
They say it is a composite frame but not resin made from that early form of composite that was a mixture of animal product and sawdust and oils or something.
The stretcher seems to be newer than the frame.
Gemini disagrees that the frame is old.
I also found out that the painting is on paper not canvas. And you can see the shadow of the painting leaking through the back.

The corner that I am showing close-ups of is when it arrived broken in the mail and I glued it back together. When you tap the frame it kind of makes a plasticy sound but AI apart from Gemini thinks that is okay and that's what composite would sound like.

 

good to know that AI , is on the job !!