Paintings Worth Looking At

What's your favorite Joseph Whiting Stock portrait? Maybe his charming niece and nephew? How about the one he painted after his death? - - - The girl on the left was sold as “Attributed to Joseph Whiting Stock (American, 1815-1855)” with much pomp and circumstance. It provides some wonderful catalog copy analyzing Stock’s difficulty with perspective, which I’m still very fond of, even if the attribution is dead wrong. Pun not intended. Guess what: the auction record for the identical companion portrait, the girl on the right , surfaced recently.

What do you do when you can’t find an artist’s name? In my experience, the only option is just to keep looking, digging, and searching through paintings, gradually grouping by style and likeness. With time and effort, the process yields a collection that looks like they belong together, a valuable base to build upon. Sometimes, miraculously, a picture will turn up with a signed inscription on the back — in which case, you celebrate for 2 minutes and keep right on going. But, in the absence of any such breakthrough, the best method is to keep collecting images, getting to know the artists and their idiosyncratic quirks. After a while, they start to feel like anonymous pen-pals whose handwriting you’d recognize anywhere.  Without further ado, allow me to present the Soft Faces Painter. Fig. 1, various sources (see article text) Their work is characterized by (as you may guess) soft, childlike faces with stylized features; distant gazes with big, rounded eyes; simplified hands, often ...