Paintings Worth Looking At

  An unexpected postscript… - - - It seems like the folk art paintings I research tend to recur again and again with alarming frequency. I'll write to a friend about an artwork I've come across, and hear "I was at that auction" or "I own that painting" or "I saw that portrait last week”! This happens so often that you'd think there's only a few dozen folk art paintings in the whole world. Except for the ones I'm trying to find , like Oliver Ellis Adams, which I expect will turn up 100 years from now in Antarctica. After posting my article about another mysterious Peckham child in blue — “Girl and Cat" — I shared it with American folk art expert and dealer David Schorsch , who's wisely advised me before on my Peckham research. And, to my astonishment, he replied as follows:

In which a cat is very hard to find, because art imitates life. It may not come as a surprise that my recent interest in the works of folk portraitist Deacon Robert Peckham has led me to compile a full catalog of known and unknown Peckhams. After all, when one discovers a new favorite artist, it’s a natural instinct to gather together all of their works, arrange them in proper detailed order, and then go find some more. Fortunately, the job’s much easier when the artist is consistent. So far, during the Peckham-scavenging process, I’ve spotted about a half-dozen of them. They’re usually not too difficult to track down. However (at risk of sounding like the Wicked Witch of the West) this little girl and her little cat escaped me for months. 

In which a terrifying little boy goes missing, but winds up immortalized in a classic horror movie. The process of compiling an artist’s works is never easy. Especially in folk art, unsigned pieces are often scattered far and wide, identified only by stylistic quirks and a tenuous chain of linked names and family connections. So, for the sake of thoroughness, whenever I’m tracking down an artist, I scrounge around as many sites as I can get my hands on. You never know what might turn up.