Antique Frame- how old is this

[ebgisler]

I have a few old frames from my great aunt. This one is quite ornate, but has some shotty repairs. Any idea of when this may have originated. Can you tell by wood, design, back nails. Any help is great. I believe the oil painting was done by a relative.

[prospero]

1870s (ish)

[Not your average framer]

It is certainly quite old, but I'll leave the dating of it to those more expert than me. The painting is really interesting, the lady in the picture is wearing what could have been a dutch, or flemish bonet. Does this check with existing known information about the painting? Also was the presence of the cat in the picture of any significance? A lot of older pictures like this were often considered to have a biblical, or religious connection, or significance. Is this the depiction of a witch, even perhaps a witch from the writings of the bible, maybe the Witch of Endor, who was consulted by Saul in ! Samuel chapter 28. If so, it is a very fine frame for such picture and probably involved quite significant expense to have produced such a frame.

There is some damage down one side of the picture, which makes me wonder if this was a print removed from a book, or even a bible. It was not uncommon for antique dealers to remove such pictures from the pages of books to increase the potential saleability of such frames that came their way. As a result of earlier connections with the antiques trade, I have encoutered this sort of thing as quite a common practice. I would therefore not necessarily assume that the picture and the frame are neccesarily dated from exactly the same time. Maybe the frame dates from perhaps about 1870, as Prospero suggests, but the era for many prints of that sort probably came from the era of more mass produced quality prints and therefore maybe the 1890,s.

If it was an earlier print then it could even be a mezzotint, which can be worth a bit more, but the subject matter suggest to me that it more likely to be a chromo-lithograph, which is what largely replaced mezzotints. There were some chrom-lithographs produced in the 1880's, but the mass production era for chrom-lithographs is more generally in the 1890's. I used to own a secondhand book and print shop in Newton Abbot and while I am careful not to claim to be any great authority on old prints and book plates, over the years I sold quite a few and know a bit about mounting up and selling prints from books too badly damaged to be worth repairing to sell the book. There was at the time a fairly healthy trade in these prints and probably the shop would not have been particularly viable just selling secondhand books alone. Eventually, graduated from selling old prints, to framing them and that's part of how I became a framer.

[Bobble]

It appears to be a very old painting on canvas but not to everyone's taste these days. Mother-in-law jokes went out with Les Dawson. However I bet it would interest New Englanders more than Californians, think Salem for example. The frame looks tired but still very expensive when new.

[Not your average framer]

Thanks for showing the frame and picture. I personally found this quite interesting.