Early in his career, George Quaintance had a minor obsession with moonflowers. He included them in more than half a dozen paintings or drawings, always juxtaposed against a buxom female nude.
Fans and admirers of the artist may be unaware of the female nudes he painted, but he was once well-known for them. The January 1939 issue of the Chicago-based Picture and Gift Journal, contained an article claiming, "George Quaintance is the originator of the 'glamour nudes,' who have all it takes to knock 'em dead from San Diego to Bangor, from Miami to Seattle."
And what's a moonflower, anyway?
As I young man, I earned spending money mowing lawns. There was a vine growing on the patio of one client that she called a moonflower. It had fragrant, pure white blossoms the size of a saucer that opened at night.
The Internet will tell you a moonflower is a member of the Morning Glory family. Georgia O'Keeffe, who attended the same Art Students League as Quaintance (but a decade earlier) also painted them. Purists will note that not all the flowers George called moonflowers actually are moonflowers, but that would be to apply a foolish consistency.
The House of Shaw published and sold many of Quaintance's lithographs; it offered a Moonflower described as, "Moon Flower, 24x30, an artist-signed limited edition watercolor gravure of a nude in an ecstatic posture bathed in a fantasy of moon flowers and moonlight in tones of silver and blue. $20 framed from House of Shaw Decorative Arts, 801 6th Ave., NYC."
In August 2021, an online auction house offered an original Quaintance painting in the Moonflower tradition (uppermost image). The listing read, "Female Nude. Oil on canvas. 1940. 610x760 mm; 24x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto. Provenance: estate of Ray Blanco, New Jersey; private collection. Quaintance was one of the early American pioneers of kitschy, homoerotic, fantasy art. His illustrations for Physique Pictorial magazine in the early 1950s helped to popularize his work. He is most sought after for his macho, campy, muscular images of cowboys, gods, matadors and other overtly masculine, skimpily-clad, idealized physical specimens. But he was also an accomplished portrait painter and landscapist. Outside of his portraiture, there are few known images of women in his oeuvre."
The opening bid was $2,200 and the lot was estimated to fetch $3,000-$5,000 — plus a 30% buyer premium. The painting sold for an eye-opening $5,800.