AC got lucky on a late 19th century watercolor landscape featuring a meandering Midwestern river and a skiff tied to the underbrush. A framer’s label on the back of the simple oak frame tells a great story, almost better than the generic watercolor itself.
When researching a painting, pay close attention to the framer’s label. It tells you not only the ‘once upon a time’ economic level of the buyer of work it encloses, but also the history of the work.
The story of a frame….
In the late 19th century if you owned a mansion it housed gold gilded frames. The label on this plain oak frame reads: Iverson Art Galleries, Milwaukee. From this label I date the art and social class of the owner. I also know the status of the framer’s shop, type of clientele he serviced, and place and taste of the time and people that enjoyed the art in his shop. All we see in this little framed watercolor comes straight out of The Music Man Broadway show. The place is full of civic pride and American Midwestern Anglo-Germanic brand of conservatism and propriety.
So AC, as a picker, found a work of art worth about $100. But, as they say, if this work of art spoke, it’d tell a $500 story. John C. Iversen, the founder of the business, manufactured frames, cabinets, mirrors, and moldings, and delved into carpentry for undertaking. His shop pictured in 1879 appears on the “Urban Milwaukee” website, shot in the day by a certain HH Bennett, a purveyor of stereo views—more about him later. The imposing late 19th century Beaux Arts style storefront was located on Water Steet south of Mason Street. Behind its twelve foot tall plate glass windows, one sees works of art which place the taste of the shop owner as straightforwardly conservative. This means no nudes, “modern” art, or art photos in his shop.
Iversen A Major Milwaukee Civic Leader
He formed a committee of businessmen who singlehandedly brought a professional ball club to the city in 1880. The Milwaukee Brewers came to life in 1884.
Iversen, a big booster for the newfangled process called photography, befriended a photographer from the Wisconsin Dells. That man, HH Bennett, made tourist stereographs. For over ten years the two men sold shots of “exotic” Wisconsin to collectors of stereographic view cards. Those near identical photographs paired side by side produced the illusion of a three-D image. Many American middleclass families afforded these cards, and avidly collected views of their vacation spots, as well as places in the world they’d never visit. The exotic Wisconsin views consisted of the Dells, and the city known as Circus City. Baraboo became home of the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1884, the largest and most famous circus in the world by the 1930s.
At age eleven I visited the Ringling Brothers Circus Museum and the AL Ringling’s Romanesque Revival Mansion (1906) with my three sibs and Mom. All three of us kids stood in a line listening to the old circus calliope, courtesy of the eldest of the five famous Ringling Brothers.
Back to the Iverson Company
In 1880 they sold a middleclass Wisconsinite the little watercolor. Iversen saw the earning potential in the new art form of photography. He published, around 1885, a collection of a hundred photogravures of notable Milwaukee sites and buildings called Milwaukee Illustrated. How did Iversen find a hundred imposing Milwaukee sites in a city that in 1885 boasted a population of 120,000?
The book cost Iversen some cash and boosterism among the higher caste of Milwaukee to create, as the photogravure process is “fancy,” and not exactly the same as the creation of silver gelatin photos. In photogravure, a photo is the basis for the image of itself etched into a copper plate, which is then burned with acid and inked to press onto paper. This creates a high contrast rich tonal range from the deepest black to the white of the paper.
AC’s frame then, is worth a bunch of good stories. The watercolor exemplifies the nice conservative Milwaukee taste of 1885 –valued today at $100.