Large Impasto Floral Still Life by Lee Reynolds for Vanguard Studios, Oil on Canvas in Dusty Rose, Sage and Cream, Signed, c. 1975–1985

The Piece

A large floral still life worked in oil so thick it has to be read as relief before it is read as a picture. The paint stands off the canvas in ridges you can see the shadow of from across a room. In the passages where the palette knife was dragged, it has left a corduroy of parallel furrows; where it was pressed and lifted, the blossoms sit up in whorled fans a quarter inch proud of the ground.

The palette is deliberately dusty. A warm taupe-brown ground carries dusty rose, sage, cream and a soft mauve, with the flower heads built in cream and white over a rose underlayer that shows through at the edges. Small deliberate hits of turquoise, yellow, coral and blue are flicked across the ground as accents, most of them the width of a knife edge.

The blossoms are not drawn so much as loaded and set down — each one a single charged sweep of the knife that turns as it lifts, so the ridges spiral out from the centre of the flower. It is a technique that cannot be corrected; the mark is either right or it is scraped off.

The canvas is signed at the lower right in a thin brown script.

The whole thing is stretched over a light wood strip frame and set in a plain narrow oak-toned moulding.

History & Provenance

The canvas is signed Lee Reynolds, and that name carries a real and well-documented history — along with one thing every buyer of these should understand up front.

Lee Reynolds Burr (1936–2017) founded Vanguard Studios in Beverly Hills in 1965, and built it into the most successful operation of its kind in the country. Vanguard produced large-format decorative canvases for the American interior design and furniture trade, sold through showrooms and design centres, and it ran on that model from the 1960s into the 1980s. The subjects ranged across abstraction, mid-century geometrics, seascapes, still lifes, florals and bullfighters, and the studio was known for working at bold scale.

Here is the part to be plain about. “Lee Reynolds” is a studio signature rather than one painter's hand. Burr directed the work creatively but did not personally paint the great majority of canvases carrying his name; Vanguard employed rotating teams of staff artists, and something on the order of half a million paintings went out under that signature over the studio's life. Burr's own original output was a few hundred works. So a Lee Reynolds canvas is an authentic product of a named and collected studio — which is a genuine thing, and the reason the market for them has revived — but it is not a unique work by a single identified artist, and we will not sell it as one.

The construction says so plainly. The canvas is commercially pre-primed and machine-stapled to a machine-mitred stretcher, and the stretcher bar carries a stock number stamped in red ink: 132719 — production inventory numbering, not an edition mark. That is how a studio tracked a canvas through a run.

The palette is the clearest dating evidence. Dusty rose, mauve, sage and cream against a warm taupe is unmistakably the late 1970s into the 1980s — the decade when interiors moved off the avocado and burnt orange of the previous one. Combined with the staple construction, the pre-primed commercial canvas and Vanguard's own operating span, that puts this at c. 1975–1985.

The individual staff painter who executed this canvas is not identified and cannot be, which is true of essentially every Vanguard work. The signature is the studio's, and that is how it is described here.

What is worth saying is that the painting is better than the category's reputation. The knife work is confident and unhesitating, the colour is held to a disciplined range rather than sprayed across the spectrum, and the impasto is thick enough to have required real paint and real time. Whoever stood at this canvas had done it many times before, and the surface is entirely hand-worked.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Scale is the whole argument. A big wall needs a big picture, and the market for large original canvases at a sane price is thin — which is exactly why this category has been rediscovered. Nothing printed does what this does, because a print is flat and this is not: raking light from a lamp or a window catches every ridge and the surface changes through the day.

The colours are the second argument. Dusty rose, sage and cream on warm taupe is a quiet, room-serving palette that will not fight upholstery, and it sits especially well against white, greige, plaster and unpainted wood. It reads as texture from across a room and as a bouquet up close.

For a designer or a shop this is the piece that fills a wall over a sofa, a bed, a console or a mantel in one move, and it is one of a kind rather than a catalogue number that a client can find online for less.

A note on care. Do not clean the surface yourself. High impasto is the hardest paint surface there is to clean safely — dust and grime settle into the valleys between ridges, and a cloth catches the peaks and can shear them off. Dust it lightly with a clean, dry, soft artist's brush, working with the ridges rather than across them, and nothing more. Never use water, solvent, or any commercial cleaner. Keep it out of direct sun and off an exterior wall that runs cold, and away from a heat source, since oil paint on canvas moves with temperature and humidity. Hang it on two points into studs or proper anchors — a canvas this size is heavier than it looks. If it ever needs real cleaning, a conservator is the answer, not a rag.