Antique Cut & Paste Silhouette of Child Playing With Doll

Peggy McClard Antiques

Americana & Folk Art

Here's a lovely cut & paste silhouette of a child wearing a low cut dress and playing with a doll. The figure is embellished with well-executed gilt embellishment and little watercolor bows and watercolor extensions to the doll's curls. Here is an interesting dilemma, the backboard of the frame (which remains the original size) bears a well-oxidized label stating that the image is "Master Richard Brome / Weston Hall / Worch____shire". Now, is it a boy playing with a doll or is the label from an image that no longer resides in the frame? A mid-1990s research project of identifying gender in folk art portraits of children found that out of 678 portraits of known child subjects, none of the children depicted with dolls were boys.¹ The study also found that 67% of the children with center hair parts were girls. This child appears to have a center hair part. So my guess is that the child depicted is not Richard Brome. This is the kind of dilemma that makes collecting fun though, isn't it? In a period veneer frame measuring 5" x 7". Circa 1840.

(#4355) $695

¹Yunginger, Jennifer A., Is She or Isn't He? Identifying Gender in Folk Portraits of Children, Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, 1995. 23.