FAMAG 2009.10.2
A British early twentieth-century reeded oak artist?s frame with flat frieze, stepped edge to sight and oak slip; finished in oil gilding on the wood; made for the painting by Sully?s of Falmouth.
About this work
view without frame
Ingram, William Ayerst (1855-1913): The Fal Estuary, signed, watercolour, 24 x 34 cms. Transferred from the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall.
More information about the frame
This frame was made by Sully's of Arwenack Street which combined running its framing business with running a Post Office in Falmouth. The back of the painting has the framers? label and telephone number 293. The frame was made in the early 1920s, after Ingram?s death, but in keeping with his taste in framing.
Gilded mounts for watercolours had originated in the phase of ?close framing? watercolours to look like oil paintings at the turn of the nineteenth century, and continued, partly because of the insistence on the practice by the Royal Watercolour Society so that exhibitions had a unity, and partly (apparently) because of the fondness of the Royal family for gilt mounts.
The use of gilded-oak close frames for watercolours, however, derives from the early watercolours of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, which were designed to enclose the painting like the gold setting of a jewel, enhancing the colours in the same way as those of an oil painting. This was possible mainly because of the invention of stronger hues based on chemical formulations during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.