I received email notification this morning of an online auction to be conducted in August, 2022 featuring several Quaintance-related items. One of them is the original oil painting of the woman in blue pictured here and in my previous blog entry. The auction house is calling the painting Moonglow. It is described as 24x24 inches, oil on canvas, signed lower right and dated 1940. The opening bid is $4,400 plus tax, a 30% buyer's premium, and whatever it costs to ship it to the winning bidder. I will report back in a month with the actual selling price.
What's interesting about this image is that the model is, to all intents and purposes, plagiarized. In 1936, photographer William Mortensen published a book titled Monsters and Madonnas. Mortensen was a well-known and controversial photographer in the '30s, whose "obscurity today is mainly due to his championing of Pictorialism, a force within photography that promoted retouching, hand-worked negatives, chemical washes, and an artistic, painterly approach that soon faded with the advance of modernism." (Link)
Quaintance's blue female nude is an undisguised copy of the Madonna on the cover of Mortensen's book. Quaintance did little more than add the flowers!