Still Life with Red Zinnias and Copper Vessel, Oil, Sage Green Gilt Frame, c. 1950–1970

The Painting

A mid-century American still life in oil, a bunch of red and orange zinnias in a blue-green pot set on a draped table with a barley-twist candlestick and a copper gourd-shaped vessel, in its original dry-brushed green and gilt frame with a linen liner. The painter has built the picture on a wedge of table that runs off the right edge, its top thrown over with a pale, striped cloth that falls in long diagonal folds, and on it set four things: a dark turned candlestick with a stub of yellow candle at the left, the squat green pot full of a dozen round, heavily worked zinnias with one fallen bloom on the cloth below, a shallow cream bowl behind, and at the right the tall pear-shaped copper vessel with a pointed lid, its belly catching a warm highlight. Behind them the ground is a loose, scumbled wash of yellow green and turquoise, brushed in every direction so that the light seems to come from inside it. The zinnias are the heart of the picture, each flower a thick knot of orange and red strokes with a lighter center, and the whole is painted with a loaded brush and a confident, untroubled hand.

The painting is oil on canvas board. It is unsigned on the face. It is in good condition, with the paint stable and the colors bright and unfaded, the surface unvarnished or very lightly varnished and reading matte, and no tears, losses or restorations. The frame is a wide cove molding in the mid-century decorator manner, dry-brushed in sage green over a gilt ground so that the gold shows through in streaks and at the edges, with a gilt inner lip and a natural linen liner with a silvered fillet at the sight edge. The frame shows light wear at the corners and the liner is a little soiled; both are original to the painting and in good order. Ready to hang.

History & Provenance

The floral still life with a candlestick and a copper pot was the set piece of the American adult painting class of the 1950s and 1960s, the arrangement that art teachers put on a draped table under a north window and that thousands of competent amateur and semi-professional painters worked through in oil, learning to turn a form with a highlight and to make a flower out of a few strokes of a loaded brush. The best of those pictures, and this is one of them, have an unselfconscious energy that the trained painters of the same years were working hard to recover, and the green and gilt dry-brushed frame with a linen liner is the frame the same painters took their work to be fitted in at the local frame shop. These paintings have come back into favor as the warm, hand-made color that a room of modern furniture needs.

The painting is unsigned and is offered as an unattributed American work. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the commercial canvas board, the loaded-brush oil technique with a scumbled ground, and the dry-brushed cove frame with its linen liner and silvered fillet are all consistent with execution between about 1950 and 1970.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a painting for a kitchen, a breakfast room, a hallway or a bedroom, where the red zinnias and the warm green ground bring a shot of color that a print never will. The sage green frame is the piece of luck here: it carries the picture into a room without any fuss, sits with painted furniture, pine, brass and linen, and makes the painting read as one object rather than a picture in a frame. It hangs alone over a chest or works in a gallery wall of other mid-century still lifes and landscapes. For a shop or designer client it is the original, framed, ready-to-hang vintage floral that fills the warm-color niche and moves at the counter.