Sepia Saturday 328: To the Rescue

Our theme image for Sepia Saturday 328 - post your posts on or around Saturday 30 April 2016 and link to the list below - is a 1914 photograph from the Flickr Commons collection of the Dutch National Archives. The caption of the photograph is "The Great War. Refugees from Antwerp, Belgium, bringing a painting into safety. Belgium, 1914" As with all Sepia Saturday visual prompts, you are free to go in whichever direction you want when interpreting this theme: there is plenty of subject matter in there just waiting to be rescued. 

Unknown artist: photograph by Nancy Javier

"I just wanted to share my new painting. Barbara and I spotted it on the side of the road in a pile of trash. She jumped out of the car and picked it up and I took it home and hung it up. It really makes me happy. I can't imagine why it was thrown away."

Barbara and Nancy introduced me to Sepia Saturday. They are rescuers of both animals and things. The above was Nancy's note on Facebook about this painting they found. The painting makes me happy too, because it was rescued but also because of the look in the eyes of the subject. I think she's asking the question, "Why was I dumped?" She was destined to find a home with Nancy and Barbara. 

I wondered if the painter was portraying two sides of this woman's personality. I know there's a shadow on one side, but the effect is of shorter, more intensely colored hair on her left and a brighter blue eye. Her right side is softer and a little more yielding. I love the unsmiling pose and the slightly off-center position of her face on the canvas.  

I echo Nancy's wonder, "Who would throw this away?"

Recently I rescued this photo from a local antique store. My rescue was more deliberate than Nancy/Barbara's; I found her for sale in an antique shop. The photo was shuffled in with postcards addressed to her from various places around the country. They all must have been part of an estate sale. I was attracted to her because of the date,1942, the year I was born, and her curly hair. Because I know her name I was able to look her up on Ancestry and find out that she was married to an optometrist in Whittier for 20 years before his death in 1977 after which she moved to Orange where she died in 2008. There was a postcard from her father in the same pile of photos and he spelled her last name incorrectly. I thought that was telling. Her husband had been married once before and perhaps her Dad didn't like him.  

Nancy and Barbara taught me how to see things in paintings that I never saw before. The pleasure I get out of viewing art has increased a thousand fold because of cruising art shows and garage sales with them. Here is a photo of me enjoying a still life in Amsterdam last year at the Rijksmuseum. I could have spent an hour on this one canvas alone.

Adriaen von Utrecht painted the banquet still life in 1644. Was it a show-off piece to demonstrate that he could paint anything? Painting was very competitive at that time and he showed in this scene that he could paint with pin-point accuracy: glass, stamped brass, seafood, bakery goods, fruit, furniture and even a monkey. The monkey, as the central figure in the secondary grouping, may be delivering the morality message in the scene as the animal frequently represented "sin" in these paintings. The fact that he's off the chain and the scene is so over-the-top luscious may lead one to interpret the painting as a cautionary tale about excess. Ah yes....nothing exceeds like excess!

Not that I'm any expert, but gradually I'm starting to learn what I like and to be able to say why I like it. Would I have liked the sketch below by Andy Warhol? No...I probably wouldn't
have paid ten dollars for it on the basis of it's merit, however it was signed and Mr. Fields might have had his suspicions. It's one of the greatest garage sale/rescues of all - photo and information from grandparents.com.

Rudy Vallee by Andy Warhol 

   "Andy Fields, a British businessman, purchased what he believed to be a child’s drawing at a yard sale in 2010, in Las Vegas. Fields was correct that a child rendered the drawing, however, he never imagined that the child artist was world famous. The artist of this drawing was none other than pop-art pioneer, Andy Warhol. Warhol sketched the drawing when he was around 10 years old, and was on bed rest, suffering from cholera. The picture depicts the 1930’s singer, Rudy Vallee.This early piece of Warhol art has been appraised at a value of roughly $2 million. However, Fields is still the owner of the piece, and is unsure of whether or not he will sell it. If he does sell the drawing at $2 million, his investment will have increased 400,000 times.