It is always an event when a new Quaintance painting surfaces or a lost canvas is found. It has been five years since a new, previously unknown painting emerged.
Meet Ramon Novarro.
Novarro lived from 1899 to 1968. He was born in Mexico, and his family moved to California in 1913 to escape the Mexican revolution. Novarro's mother claimed to be a descendant of none other than Montezuma himself! Like Quaintance, Novarro was originally a dancer. He was working as a singing waiter when he was discovered by Hollywood. The silent screen's original Ben-Hur, Novarro quickly became cinema's new Latin Lover and hottest sex symbol after the premature death of Rudolph Valentino. Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jennifer Jones, and Myrna Loy were among Novarro's illustrious costars.
Novarro was truly one of Quaintance's contemporaries, and the fact that both men were gay and had close attachments to Hollywood makes it tempting to think they may have known each other.
These two portraits were discovered by a dealer of celebrity autographs and illustration art who lives in Georgia. He wrote, in an email to me, "I acquired them from a small regional auction house in Maine, which had no idea what it had (and could not decipher the signature)."
The dealer thought they may have been painted for use as movie magazine covers. They measure 15 by 20 inches and are painted on art boards. The back of one of the boards is stamped "ABACCO ILLUSTRATION BOARD distributed in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia." (Abbaco later changed its spelling to Abaco.)
Removed from the frame, one of the paintings shows damage to all four corners. This painting was offered on eBay and sold on April 11, 2020, to its only bidder, for $650.
Absent the signatures that puzzled the auction house, neither painting would make one think, "It's a Quaintance." The colors are somber, there is little detail, and the hair — which Quaintance rendered with such panache and precision in his later canvases — looks as lifeless as a wig, especially in the portrait on the left. Nevertheless, these portraits are a welcome addition to the Quaintance oeuvre.
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