Bert Bayliss Folk Art Lighthouse Oil, Inscribed Pensacola Wedding Gift, 1955

The Painting

A memory painting in the true sense, an oil on canvas of a white lighthouse on a sea cliff with a pair of white cottages behind it, a wall of dark firs and a range of snow-capped blue mountains beyond, painted in 1955 by Bert Bayliss and inscribed on the back in his own hand as a wedding gift to a newly married couple in the family. The lighthouse stands tall at the center right, a tapering white tower with two railed galleries and a red domed lantern, and the cliff it stands on is cut away in blocks of ochre and umber rock that drop straight into a calm blue sea. To the left a meadow of green grass dotted with yellow flowering shrubs and pink boulders rolls back to the cottages and the forest, and above it all a sky of piled white clouds takes up the top half of the canvas.

The handling is careful and sincere, the work of a self-taught painter who had looked hard at the world and wanted to set down what he remembered. Each boulder is modeled, each fir tree is a separate stroke, the clouds are built up in soft layers, and the mountains are laid in with a lighter and lighter blue as they recede, which gives the picture real depth for all its simplicity. The lighthouse itself is drawn with the straight-edged confidence of a man who had seen a few. The whole is in the clear, high-key palette of the American naive tradition, and it carries that tradition's directness and charm.

The back of the canvas carries a long inscription in pencil: painted by Bert Bayliss, September 1955, in Pensacola, Florida, to Ida and Gene as a wedding gift from Pops and Mom, and the line that makes the picture, this was painted from memory of some place I have seen in my years of traveling. The frame is the original wide, flat, limed and pickled wood molding of the period, with the soft gray-white finish rubbed through to the grain at the edges. The canvas is sound and taut and the paint surface is stable, with a few tiny specks of loss to the sky at the upper left and the gentle softening of a picture that has hung in a family home for seventy years. The frame shows light wear to the finish. It hangs flat and is ready for the wall.

History & Provenance

Memory painting is the heart of American folk art in the twentieth century. It is the picture painted not from a model or a photograph but from the inside, by someone who had lived a long life and wanted to fix a place they had loved before it faded, and the painters who made these pictures were farmers, sailors, tradesmen and retired people who took up the brush late and painted what they knew. Grandma Moses is the famous one; there were thousands of others, and their work is collected now for exactly the quality this picture has, a sincerity that no trained painter can imitate. The lighthouse on a cliff with mountains behind it is a landscape of the mind rather than a map, and the painter says so himself on the back.

The picture was painted in Pensacola, Florida, in September 1955 and given as a wedding present, and everything about its condition says it hung in a family home for decades afterward. Bert Bayliss is not a listed artist and no other work by him has been found; the painting is offered on the strength of its own quality and its inscription, which dates it, places it and names its maker in a way that very few folk paintings can match. The frame, the canvas and the paint are all consistent with the date on the back.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Few pictures come with their own story written on the back, and this one tells it in the painter's own words. It is a lighthouse painting for a coastal house, a cottage or a cabin, and a folk painting for a collected interior that values the handmade and the heartfelt over the polished. The pale limed frame and the clear blues, whites and greens make it an easy picture to hang against white walls, natural wood, linen and blue and white ceramics, and it brings a calm, sunny, slightly dreamlike quality to a bedroom, a hall, a study or a kitchen. For a shop or designer client it is the dated, signed, inscribed American memory painting in its original frame that folk art buyers look for and rarely find.