1885 Elizabeth Nourse Gouache with Original Frame
GUEST: The family story is, my great-great-grandfather helped a family that lived in Connecticut move, and the payment for helping them was this painting.
APPRAISER: What year would this have been around?
GUEST: '40s? '30s?
APPRAISER: Oh, wow, okay.
GUEST: And it's been hanging in our dining room for the last 14 years.
APPRAISER: Oh, wow!
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: Well, that's really, really neat. So obviously, you cherish it, because you have it in a...
GUEST: We do.
APPRAISER: ...place of honor.
GUEST: We do, yep.
APPRAISER: And who is the artist?
GUEST: Elizabeth Nourse. I know that she was from Cincinnati, Ohio...
APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.
GUEST: ...or a small town outside of there, moved to Paris, and that's really all I know.
APPRAISER: Well, yes, she was born in the Cincinnati area in 1859, and ultimately ends up in Paris, where she, uh, passes away in 1938. In her early career, she started out in Cincinnati, moved to New York, like many artists might do, and studied with an artist named William Sartain. And she also knew the well-known painters William Merritt Chase and Julian Alden Weir. She briefly goes back to Cincinnati, but like most artists, really wanted to go abroad. And so she moves to Paris to study at the Academy Julian. She was very much admired by the critics in Paris. And so in the Paris Salon of 1900, they actually called her an artist, not a woman who paints. She was one of the first American women to become a member of the Society Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1901, so that was also quite an achievement for her. And so what we have here is a gouache on paper. And you can see that it's on a rather brown paper. Originally, the paper would have been a tannish color, but over the years, because of the content of the paper, it tends to discolor. So it's not really damaged. It's just something that's inherent to the paper. And of course, it's a beautiful rendering of lilacs.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And you can see that in the lower left, she's signed with her initial E., and it's dated '85 for 1885. The frame is magnificent, and the floral design along the edges really emulates the lilacs in the piece. And so perhaps it was chosen just for that reason. And this kind of elaborate frame was very popular in the 1880s and '90s, as well as this interesting gold-leaf mat. It's an excellent package. Women artists are now really the bill of fare, are very popular. The issue with Nourse is that she was painting a lot of European subjects, and particularly her peasant subjects are not necessarily what Americans are collecting today. And mostly her work is collected by Americans. So her, her market's fallen off a little bit. But that being said, she, she is highly revered and there still is interest in her work. And if this were in a gallery, either in Cincinnati or in New York, I think that it would sell in the range of $15,000.
GUEST: Cool. I'm happy with that.
$15,000 Retail
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