Hello folks

July 12, 2011 12:52 PM

Your opinion on this American naive/folk painting?

So I am an amateur antique hunter and buy whatever strikes me as odd or unusual or in this case folk-y. Which is all well and good but I often have a hard time identifying what I found. I am having a hard time figuring this one out.

My spidey sense tells me it may be a modern painting that has been aged to make it look like an antique but stylistically I am not so sure. There is no signature. It is painted on an old cabinet door and the paint has been covered with a varnish of some sort. The cabinet has a wood veneer on it. Is it 70's folksy or is it actually fairly old? I've been googling like a mad man for a day now and can't find anything that really matches it in terms of the perspective and the size of the people featured and the adornments in each corner.

Some images:

Overall

Detail 1

Detail 2

Detail 3

Thanks in advance.

posted by WickedPissah to media & arts (6 answers total)

It's 70s folksy - 100%

Whether it's a malicious fake or just someone fooling around in the style is hard to tell but it's not very old. The style is also all wrong.
posted by fire&wings at 12:56 PM on July 12, 2011

It looks completely modern-folksy to me in a lot of ways, but in particular the arc-with-two-clouds rainbows strike me as 70s all the way. It seems to me that when rainbows show up in early art, they usually go all the way to the ground or disappear behind trees or other landscape. I wonder how you would go about figuring out the evolution of that particular iconography?
posted by peachfuzz at 1:07 PM on July 12, 2011

Per peachfuzz's comment, a book like this might help with dating that style of rainbow.
posted by jabes at 1:12 PM on July 12, 2011

Note to self: Trust your spidey sense.

Thanks everyone for the quick answers. The weird smiles and the faces in general set me off too. But whatever, its still kind of neat. My mom may like it.
posted by WickedPissah at 1:18 PM on July 12, 2011

Your spidey sense is correct. Not authentic, 19th-century folk art, no way, no how.
posted by scody at 1:19 PM on July 12, 2011

For trivia purposes that's the top of a sewing machine cabinet. The hinge detail nails it. The hinge itself would keep a spring loaded button in place so when you opened it an arm would be freed so you could rest the top on it. Most cabinets I've seen like that where made in the 50's or 60's.
posted by Max Power at 2:40 PM on July 12, 2011