John Rae Oil with Paper Collage, ca. 1915
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GUEST:
It was my mom and dad's painting, and my father passed away a number of years ago. Mom just passed away last year, and I found it in a closet when I was cleaning out, packing up after she passed away. I had heard this story when I was a child about how they were on a road trip. It was probably the late '50s, maybe early '60s. My dad was stationed in Connecticut at the time and they were on a cross-country road trip, and Dad saw this old barn, dilapidated building of some sort, that had a trash pile and he could see this painting in the trash pile. Dad was an artist, so he thought it was interesting, and he stopped and, uh, picked this up, put it in the car, and they went on about their road trip. And it stayed in the closet the whole time I was a kid. I remember seeing it in the closet. Never really thought much about it.
APPRAISER:
Well, it's signed down here, John Rae. John Rae was born in 1882, he studied in New York at the Art Students' League under a well-known American illustrator named Howard Pyle. And he contributed illustrative work to about 50 books, and did a lot of work for magazines, as well.
GUEST:
Wow, I didn't know.
APPRAISER:
He also wrote and illustrated children's books, and he did write a book about Alice. He seemed to be somewhat obsessed with Alice, I think. He felt that the two books written by Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, just weren't enough. So he wrote this book called The New Adventures of Alice. It was published in 1917 and it was one of the first to put Alice into a different setting, and she encountered various characters from Mother Goose in this book.
GUEST:
Hm.
APPRAISER:
I did buy a copy of the book that he wrote, and this is not in the book, but through some more research, I found that what this is is kind of a mash-up of the two books by Lewis Carroll. So at the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there are all these cards that fly up towards Alice. So here you see the jack of hearts.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
Then, in the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice has an encounter with the Red Queen. So he's kind of combined the end of one book with the beginning of the next book. While we don't have an actual date of this painting's execution, based on the fact that the artist was born in 1882, and he published his book in 1917, I would think it might be early 20th century, maybe circa 1915. The painting is oil, and it's actually painted on artist board. This jack of hearts is an actual playing card. So this is oil with paper collage, we would call it
APPRAISER:
Later in his life, he got interested in portraiture, and he painted such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Carl Sandburg. He also did a very nice portrait of the real Alice in Wonderland, Alice Liddell, who was Lewis Carroll's next-door neighbor. She was the child that Lewis Carroll wrote the books for. There were a lot of other artists who illustrated “Alice in Wonderland.” John Tenniel was the original illustrator for the two “Alice in Wonderland" books. Arthur Rackham, even Salvador Dalí. Yayoi Kusama also did illustrations for Alice. Although John Rae is a very good illustrator, he's not quite as famous as some of the other people who did illustrate Alice. It's a little bit dirty and a little bit beat-up. I think in a retail setting, the asking price might be around $10,000.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
Not bad for something rescued from the trash!
GUEST:
(chuckles) Not bad, not bad for the trash, no, yeah. That's surprising, wow, wow, yeah, didn't know.
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