Edward Borein Watercolor, ca. 1930
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GUEST:
My grandparents I believe acquired this when they were living in Santa Fe. Time period I'm not sure, '30s I would guess. They passed it down to my parents, then when my parents passed away about five years ago and I inherited it then.
APPRAISER:
You've brought us a very interesting watercolor by Edward Borein. He was really a cowboy's cowboy. And unlike a lot of the western painters that went to Taos and Santa Fe, he actually did not. He was from California and as a little boy he watched cattle herders and cowboys, and from the age of five he started sketching. And after he finishes high school he goes off and works on a ranch. Then he went to San Francisco, where he goes to art school. And it was there that he studied with Maynard Dixon, who's one of the Taos painters. And that's how he basically learned to paint. He stays there for a few years and then eventually goes to New York. And he studies at the Art Students League with a well-known artist named Childe Hassam, and it was there that he took up the study of etching. So he's a bit unusual in that most of the Taos painters are oil painters, and he is primarily a watercolorist, a draftsman doing ink drawings and an etcher, and he was quite prolific. In New York he was very popular. He had a studio that he dressed up in all this western garb and he knew Charlie Russell and he knew Will Rogers. And they would all come to his studio and hang out, and he really enjoyed himself there. But he found that New York was not his cup of tea so he ends up moving back to California to Santa Barbara, and he was an illustrator, he illustrated books, he was an illustrator for Saturday Evening Post. And so quite, quite well-known. He tended to focus on cowboys as opposed to Indians. And here we have several groups of Indians even here in the distance, and it is atypical from the cowboy scenes. And normally collectors like action scenes and cowboys roping or herding, but it has wonderful color, the sky is great, the condition of the watercolor itself looks quite fresh. And if this were in a gallery that was offering western art, I think the price would be $35,000.
GUEST:
No kidding. No kidding. That's incredible. I never would have guessed that.
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