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poliphilo I'd been waiting for a picture to turn up. Something that would hang in the front living room and pull all its disparate elements together. Until it did we wouldn't be able to finish decorating. So I put out a call to the universe, quietly confident it would punt something suitable our way.
And it did.
We were at the recycling centre yesterday and there it was. A framed oil. A still life. Big. Bold. Striking. The work of someone who knew what they were doing. A colourist. Painted in the style favoured in British art schools in the 1950s- honest, expressionist/realist/kitchen sink, rough-edged, generous with the impasto, in fealty to Cezanne- a style I associate with John Bratby, though there were plenty of other people doing similar work.
How very 1950s that the dominant object should be a cabbage.
It is signed Renate 57.
It isn't perfect. The space the objects sit in is sketchy, unresolved, ambiguous (I don't know what's supposed to be happening down the right hand side) but all in all it's pretty damn fine.
Who was Renate?
Long shot, this, but there was a artist called Renate Keeping, nee Meyer, German born, Jewish, married to the illustrator Charles Keeping, died 2014. She has an online presence, but I can't find images of anything she did before the 1980s. Her later work- book illustration and collage and multi-media- is not inconsistent with her once having produced big splashy oils.
And how many competent British painters called Renate were around in the 1950s? And with the confidence (I'm a proper artist I am!) to sign their work with their first name, boldly- just like Van Gogh.
I hate to say what I paid for it because it might seem like gloating. Lets just note that on the same trip we paid £10 for a nest of tables and the painting cost less. Considerably less...
And it did.
We were at the recycling centre yesterday and there it was. A framed oil. A still life. Big. Bold. Striking. The work of someone who knew what they were doing. A colourist. Painted in the style favoured in British art schools in the 1950s- honest, expressionist/realist/kitchen sink, rough-edged, generous with the impasto, in fealty to Cezanne- a style I associate with John Bratby, though there were plenty of other people doing similar work.
How very 1950s that the dominant object should be a cabbage.
It is signed Renate 57.
It isn't perfect. The space the objects sit in is sketchy, unresolved, ambiguous (I don't know what's supposed to be happening down the right hand side) but all in all it's pretty damn fine.
Who was Renate?
Long shot, this, but there was a artist called Renate Keeping, nee Meyer, German born, Jewish, married to the illustrator Charles Keeping, died 2014. She has an online presence, but I can't find images of anything she did before the 1980s. Her later work- book illustration and collage and multi-media- is not inconsistent with her once having produced big splashy oils.
And how many competent British painters called Renate were around in the 1950s? And with the confidence (I'm a proper artist I am!) to sign their work with their first name, boldly- just like Van Gogh.
I hate to say what I paid for it because it might seem like gloating. Lets just note that on the same trip we paid £10 for a nest of tables and the painting cost less. Considerably less...
