Featured Do I have a Gold Medal winning Painting from the late 1800's ?

Interesting thread to follow along with!

 

Remember to update the thread when you hear something!

 

Three newspaper clippings from between 1880-1881. The first one seems the most pertinent, and leads me to believe that the original oleograph (one of the four mentioned) has been entirely painted over.

 

Very good find @smallaxe ! I cannot see any other image under the mountains, now I'm thinking that the original oleograph may have been on separate paper or canvas mounted to the stretched canvas that was completely removed ...

 

Printers can work their magic just like artists. I always thought my Grandmother's painting by an Italian named Sandrini was an original. Nope, it's an edition of 70. She willed it to me before passing because I admired it so much and still do. It's also possible that artists will embellish the prints with a few strokes of their own to add texture and the appearance of original art to help sell it.

You can see areas in the sky of this painting that look flat and printed, while the house looks like brushwork. Even right around the house you can see the paint flatten out. It makes sense for the artist to embellish the work because the small vineyard house is the focal point. Man or machine, I still enjoy this art on my wall!

 

@smallaxe "...leads me to believe that the original oleograph (one of the four mentioned) has been entirely painted over."

I vote this is what happened. The print was painted over and was signed by the second artist. It explains why the stamp is there.

 

I looked at the pictures. As a novice, it looked like an original oil. I wanted to simply pose, could it be the artist reused a canvas to paint over a "Oleograph" to create his/her own work?

Edit: why the other 2 pages of comments didn't show is beyond me, but I am glad to see I may have come to the correct conclusion....lol

 

Great finds, @smallaxe. May I ask how you found those advertisements?

 

There are several historical newspaper archives (some paid, some free) that I use a lot for historical and genealogical research. Those ads were found doing some searches at newspapers.com. It's largely USA papers, but does have some UK papers too.

 

Interesting. Good work on finding them.

 

A reused canvas would explain it. The Scots are notoriously thrifty.

 

The only issue left is the signature. The only H McGregor I can find is Harry McGregor. The signature doesn't look right to me. The painting does look legitimately old though, over 100 years, and has craquelure.

 

You don't say where your comparisons are from, but they are clearly not the same signature as your original painting. There are several important differences - yours appears to be signed McGREGOR, and the comparisons are MacGregor. I understand that Mc and Mac are basically interchangeable, but it seems an individual artist would be consistent in how he/she chose to sign their family name. The Capital Ms and Gs are also quite different. Looking more closely, the "O" between the G and R on yours looks a little odd, more like an A. But I cannot find anything using that spelling.

It may be that your artist is simply unknown, and not listed in major references.

 

How much do you pay for newspapers.com? I've wondered whether it would be worthwhile to subscribe. I do a lot of research on 19th-century photographers, and also do genealogical research. I do have access to newspaperarchive.com through my local university. You probably know they are competitors, but I don't think there is much overlap between their offerings.

 

I learn something new every day with you guys!

 

Newspapers.com is one of the pricier choices. I generally don't stay subscribed. I usually cancel my subscription right after paying so that it doesn't auto renew. I let it lapse when the subscription period ends. Then, I will renew when I actually need it for a project I'm working on, and only pay the for period of time I expect to use it. If it's a one-off thing I want to see, sometimes I can get away with just using a 7 day trial. Sometimes I'll just do 1 month (about $8), and sometimes 6 months ($45). I almost never do the more expensive publisher extra that includes papers more in the vintage era. Newspapers.com is the most expensive option, but I find it the most successful option. I usually find the best stuff there, and it's really easy to clip articles. Searching success for old newspapers is completely dependent on the quality of the OCR conversion of images to text. Maybe newspapers.com has done a better job of that. The OCR issue is also why it's important to search a couple different ways in case one of your key words was incorrectly digitized and indexed. I've found very useful articles that way that I would have missed otherwise.

Another option I use is genealogybank.com, which is about half the price of newspapers.com. It's pretty good too. There are free options. Library of Congress has newspapers online, but the search is kind of hit and miss, the clipping is a bit less convenient, and the amount of content is limited. There are also free state by state archives for many states in the US, often hosted by some university. Some of them are very good, and have a lot of content, but limited of course within the boundaries of that state. Here are some examples:
Library of Congress
Georgia
Pennsylvania
New York
You can usually find them by googling something like this:
Montana historic newspapers
I wish I was as tuned in to similar resources in Europe. I have a long term project researching my wife's great aunt, who despite being an elderly American woman, lived in Belgium throughout WWII, and was involved in the Belgian underground (the Comet Line - Réseau Comète). It's been a struggle finding mentions of her (and the EU privacy rules contribute greatly to that difficulty).