FAMAG 2006.6
Version of an antique French late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century architrave artist's frame with matt and burnished water gilding; supplied by Paul Mitchell Ltd. Version of an antique French late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century architrave artist's frame with matt and burnished water gilding; supplied by Paul Mitchell Ltd.
About this work
view without frame
Gotch, Thomas Cooper RBA RI RP (1854-1931): Study for The Birthday Party, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 61 cms.
More information about the frame
This very simple flat frame, with its top fillet and broad steps, derives from the earliest plain Italian cassetta frames of the fifteenth century. It lingered as a studio frame, knocked together quickly from staves of wood to protect studies and sketches, and then reappeared in an elevated version to frame the flat decorative works of the French Symbolists and Aesthetic painters (see Gervex, Le quai de la Villette à Paris, 1882, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille; Raffaëlli, Self-portrait, 1879, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Degas also used a very flat, architrave pattern for his work, either with a raised fluted top edge or (for his patron Count Isaac de Camondo) with a twisted ribbon at the top edge. The present frame has great affinity with Degas?s designs, in its raised top edge and stepped section, and seemed the ideal choice for its subject ? girls in ballerina-like dresses − and for its aesthetic approach and frieze-like composition.