Portrait of a Woman, Oil, Inscribed Roxanne Gribbin, c. 1965–1975

The Painting

A head and shoulders portrait of a fair haired woman turned three quarters to the viewer, painted in oil on canvas and held in a reeded stained wood frame with a small cast ornament at the corner. She looks out and slightly past, the mouth closed, the expression composed and a little cool. The hair is swept up and back from a side part in a full soft wave, and a pale scarf or collar is gathered loosely at the throat.

The handling is the best thing here. This was painted wet into wet in a single sitting, and the painter left most of the warm toned ground showing through rather than covering it. The background is barely touched. The shoulders and the scarf are suggested in a few broad sweeps that stop short of being finished. All the work went into the face, and only the face is fully resolved. That restraint is a trained decision and not a shortcut, and it is what separates this from an amateur likeness.

The palette is deliberately narrow, running ochre and cream and raw canvas, with three places where the painter let color in. Green sits in the brow and the shadow of the eyelid, a warm pink carries the cheek, and a clear red marks the lower lip. On a ground this quiet those three notes do all the work.

History & Provenance

The face of the painting carries no signature. On the back of the canvas, written in pencil in a plain half printed hand near the top, is the name Roxanne Gribbin. That is the only inscription on the work. There is no date, no title, no medium, no gallery label and no supplier stamp.

That name has been researched rather than assumed, and it does not belong to a recorded painter. The standard index of listed American artists carries Gribben, Gribble, Gribbon, Gribbons and Gribbroek, and no Gribbin of any first name. A search of the principal auction databases returns no artist of the name under any spelling. The name is not in the literature.

What the inscription most likely records is the sitter, or an owner. Four things point that way. It is a name alone, where a painter signing a reverse in place of the front almost always adds a title or a date or a city. It is half printed rather than written in a signature hand. It is in pencil, which is the medium of the framer and the stockroom rather than of an artist marking a finished work, because pencil on raw canvas rubs away. And it sits high on the reverse, which is where handling and inventory notes go. Against that, one real convention runs the other way. A study of this kind, alla prima with the ground left open, is exactly what gets made in a portrait class or an atelier session, and students write their own names on the backs of canvases so the work finds its way home. That possibility is left open here rather than argued away.

The painting is therefore offered unsigned and unattributed, inscribed Roxanne Gribbin on the reverse, with that name most likely identifying the woman in the picture. The date rests on the sitter herself. The full swept wave, the side part and the green worked through the eye belong to a particular decade of American dressing, and a portrait records the moment it was painted in a way an undated object does not.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Portraits of strangers are the most undervalued thing in the picture market, and the reason is that buyers think they need to know who the sitter is. They do not. What a good portrait gives a room is a human presence at eye level, and this one has a real one. She is not smiling for anybody. The painter caught someone slightly guarded and left it at that.

The colors make it easy to place. Ochre, cream and bare canvas sit against almost any wall, and because the background is nearly empty the picture reads as calm from across a room and only resolves into a face when you come closer. Hang it in a hall, a stair, a study or above a chest where someone passes it every day. One like this is worth more to a room than three landscapes.

And there is the name on the back. Someone took the trouble to write it in pencil so that whoever came next would know. Most portraits lose that, and this one still has it.