I was sitting there at auction reading an antiques newspaper, not paying much attention, waiting for my next item of interest when I glanced up to see a painting being offered for bids.
It looked familiar, with its stylized image of a Madonna and child bordered by a hot-pink mat. A little gaudy, I’d say. As the auction staffer held the piece a-loft so we could all view it closely, I spied the name of the artist in the lower right corner.
Sam J. Brown.
I sat up, alert. I finally recognized the painting because I had seen it during a preview last year of artwork at the auction house. It wasn’t one that captured my attention then, but I knew the artist’s name. Samuel J. Brown – also known as Samuel Joseph Brown and Samuel J. Brown Jr. – was a black Philadelphia artist whose work I had acquired a couple years ago at this same auction house.
This piece apparently was never sold, or someone had purchased it at a previous auction and never paid for it. So, I decided to bid on it when the auctioneer dropped the initial bid to $10. Someone counter-bidded and I kept at it. I got the painting for $20.
It’s not a large painting; it’s slender (a lithe Madonna, like the three women in the Brown watercolor I have at home). It’s 11″ x 30″.
The painting appeared to be on thin tissue paper with gold-leaf accents; the medium watercolor. The word “holy night” was in gold leaf. At some point, the painting was apparently folded because there was a crease across the center and some paint loss on Madonna’s robe. The hot-pink matting was an awful backdrop.
I’ll obviously have it reframed, primarily because the frame shop – which stamped its name on the back – used cardboard as the back cover. Any reputable frame shop would never use cardboard. A painting, a print, whatever should be framed in acid-free or archival materials. Fortunately, the cardboard hadn’t been on this one long enough to cause damage.
I’m glad I was able to get the painting because I try to collect local artists like Brown, whose works are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Howard University Collection.
The Philadelphia museum included a Brown watercolor “The Lynching” (1934) in an exhibit a few years ago. The painting was part of a 1935 exhibit in New York called “An Art Commentary on Lynching,” described in this Crisis magazine article (page 106). It was organized by the NAACP, which had to find another location for the exhibit when the first gallery pulled out because of the subject matter.
The painting is mentioned in the book “Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century” (page 161), published in 1997. There is also a photo of it.
Brown was a painter, printmaker, sculptor and teacher who was born in Wilmington, NC, in 1907 and moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1917. He attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and the Teachers’ College of the University of Pennsylvania. Like many artists during the 1930s, he worked for the Work Projects Administration and the Federal Art Project, and participated in many exhibitions. In later years, he taught art in the Philadelphia school system. He died in 1994. The self-portrait at left is from the Metropolitan Museum website.
Here are other examples of his works:
Wash Girl (1935), woodcuts sold at Swann Auction Galleries (below) in 2007 and Pook and Pook Auctioneers in 2008, along with others examples at askart.com.
