Focus On: ???

Art of the Week is taking on a different flavor this week, because 1. I am sleepy due to a 7:30 breakfast meeting this morning (at least the food was good!), so the brain is not firing on all cylinders, 2. there is some intrigue about this work, and 3. it'll give you all a chance to be art historians. So without further ado:
We acquired this work in 2006 from a collector who had Hoosier-roots even though he spent the vast majority of his life in Cambridge, MA. It is is listed in our catalogs as by Charles Dana Gibson--late 19th century illustrator extraordinaire, inventor of the Gibson Girl (and by extension: New Women, changing roles of feminists, fashions for young women, the counter example of the Gibson Man, etc), expert social critic and caricaturist, and subject of one on-going paper by yours truly. Except..it's not by Gibson, nor is it of the Gibson Girls, as the registered title would suggest.

So...what is it? The short answer is, we don't know. I have viewed it a few times (you can request a print viewing, which means I get to hang out with my museum-employed friends and look at prints which is awesome) and have viewed it with the works on paper curator and neither of us are the wiser. She had doubts about the attribution for awhile, as the subject matter doesn't seem very Gibson-like--he focused on society women, not immigrant or peasant women like these, even though their faces look similarly lovely, and he did draw servants sometimes. After consulting Gibson's signature on some known works, it confirmed what we already knew--somewhere along the way, the signature was misattributed (and the kind gent who donated the work was known for not having the greatest records of his works, so a dead end there).

Furthermore, we can't figure out what the signature IS. The curator has looked at signature dictionaries (yes, there is such a thing!) with no luck. My American professor rightly (I think) identified these girls as exotic "types," Spanish or Italian, but none of us know if it was created in Europe or America. Or when. The colors in the image are a bit washed out--the greens and reds are more vibrant in person, and really quite lovely. Gibson did do some work in oils and watercolors later in life, even though he is known primarily as an illustrator for Life. It's just a bummer that this work isn't one of his! It would have made my paper a lot cooler, for one thing. At the same time, though, it's kind of refreshing. I'm so used to studying Western art that is identifiable, that finding something new--even something as minor as this--is pretty fun. I just don't know what to do about it.

***
In completely unrelated news, my mom bought me a loveseat over the weekend (thanks, momma!) and it was delivered today and I'm lying on it now, which is making me really happy. I didn't have any real furniture in my living room until now ("living room" being a sort of a loose term as a I live in a studio). Despite being a used loveseat, it doesn't look too shabby! And who would turn down that awesome 1980's gold fringe, really.