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I found this rolled up in a wine celler in Böblingen, Germany. I took a close-up of what I think is a signature/monogram. Any guesses or advice to point me in the right direction will be greatly appreciated.
Posted
I think you have come to the wrong site Aaron , people on here are artists . I do t think we can help you , unless someone has seen this before. We often get people asking us to identify a painting or artist, you need to go to one of the big dealers who have resources to research . Good luck .
Posted
I don't know, but if it's a canvas, it's in some need of care. It's a competent painting, but beyond that is anybody's guess - I don't see any hint of a signature, and presume there's no mark on the back? Do you have any back-story, which could help us a bit? Not that we're likely to be successful in identifying what looks like an unstretched canvas which has never been in a frame.
If it's worth conserving - i.e. worth it to you, it's unlikely to fetch a high price, pleasant enough and well-enough executed though it is - the best bet would be to glue it, with archival glue, to a rigid panel - that would at least stop the tensions in the canvas, which look (unless it's a trick of the light) to have caused some paint to flake off the support. A restorer could do that, see if the paintwork is repairable, and ultimately apply a coat of protective varnish - or even a mount, and glass.
Posted
By the somewhat ragged edges, I think it’s a stretched canvas that’s been cut off the stretchers at some point for storage.
Rolling up a canvas for any extended period is not advisable, as can be confirmed by the awful state this is now in.
Yes, glue it to say an MDF or wooden board as Robert suggests, but it’s not worth spending large sums of money on restoration - it’s definitely been painted by an amateur hand although it does show some degree of competence.
There’s a lot going on here for a still life, a case of ‘let’s fill every available space’ which doesn’t generally work that well!
Posted
Rolling up a canvas for any extended period is not advisable, as can be confirmed by the awful state this is now in. Alan Bickley on 12/01/2022 08:50:18Having never used oil, I don't know if what I once read is true. It was suggested that if you must roll a canvas, do it with the paint on the outside. The idea being that, if the paint cracks in the process, when it is unrolled, the edges of the cracks will be brought together (ie closed). Whereas, if rolled 'paint in', the act of unrolling will open the cracks. As I said, it's just something I read.
Edited
by Colin Berwick
Posted
I think you have come to the wrong site Aaron , people on here are artists . I do t think we can help you , unless someone has seen this before. We often get people asking us to identify a painting or artist, you need to go to one of the big dealers who have resources to research . Good luck .Thank you for the advice. And also, thank you for the insight from everyone. I have an idea of where to go with it from here. Sadly, this is the condition I found it in. What lead my curiosity was the residue of egg on the bottom and the location it was found.
Edited
by Aaron Cripe
Posted
I've got slightly more respect for it than Alan has - very slightly, and he's right that the artist has tried to cram the canvas with just about everything he or she could think of - but I'm wondering if this wasn't one of those mass-produced pictures, painted with a fair degree of technical ability, which the Chinese tend to produce in large quantities for the European market; perhaps removed from its frame to make way for a better painting.
I'm not trying to insult your painting, just reinforcing Alan's point: I wouldn't go spending a fortune on its restoration. If it were mine, I would glue it to board, and varnish it, just to protect it from further damage - I presume you like it, damage and all, and my philosophy is - better an indifferent picture on the wall than no picture at all. Even with the residue of egg ... did you find it in a restaurant skip? Might explain a lot. It wouldn't have looked at all out of place in an eatery.
On rolling oil-painted canvases - always best avoided in my opinion, but Colin is right, if you're going to do it at all, it's slightly better to roll them with the painted side outwards - so they say: I've never done it, but if I did I'd roll the canvas as loosely as possible. With some of the thin cotton canvases available today, which really give a very poor support to paintings even when stretched on bars, I'd not even think of doing it. A heavy linen or flax, maybe: but - you wouldn't want to treat a decent bit of linen like that!
Posted
Just realized I missed the last lines of your original post: you found it in a wine cellar in Germany - not in a skip outside a restaurant: apologies, I just didn't notice those extra lines. Even enlarged, though, I can't make out either a signature or monogram - it does look a lot like a Chinese painting-factory work, though, the more I look at it: I don't despise these - they are what they are, and doubtless brighten many a dull corner: their value does tend to lie mostly in the frame, though (and not always overmuch value even there). Chinese mass-artists are very good at making effects with the minimum of paint and effort - and one thing's for sure: they're better than certain US painters who more or less copied those effects, but heavy-handedly and with rubbish paint!