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Signed ‘Jonas Bradford’ (lower right).
Sizes:
Frame: 50 × 74 cm | 19.7 × 29.1 in
Artwork: 50 × 61 cm | 19.7 × 24 in
A small American town on a bright day. A green steam locomotive, numbered A 193, pulls a tender and a boxcar past a yellow clapboard house; two men in green walk beside the track and a figure leans from the car door. Across the road stand a general store with a hand-lettered sign for crocks and pans, a lamp shop, a horse grazing beside a buggy, picket fences, a kitchen garden and, beyond the fields, a line of hills. Every board, window and shingle is drawn in with a ruler-straight patience, and the colours are kept clean and sweet: lemon yellow, mint green, pink and sky blue.
Jonas Bradford is a folk painter known through pictures like this one, placed by the American trade in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s and 1960s. Trains, barns, general stores and village streets are his recurring subjects, painted in the memory-painter tradition of Grandma Moses. Signed at the lower right.
In a gilt and brown wooden frame with a cream slip.
Private Collection, Spain.
Certificate of Authenticity: Included (Issued by Aurora & Athena).
Packed as size M (up to 80 × 60 cm) · 74 × 50 cm framed
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Jonas Bradford is one of those American folk painters known almost entirely through the pictures themselves. Dealers and auction houses place him in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s and 1960s, and his paintings bear this out: clapboard houses and general stores with hand-lettered signs, white picket fences, a horse and buggy on a dirt road, a small steam train passing through a village, red barns in autumn, lighthouses on a flat shore. The colours are bright and clean, the drawing deliberately plain, every board of a house ruled in, in the manner of the memory painters who followed Grandma Moses.
Little is documented about his life, and no biography has been published. The works are signed in a careful cursive, usually on canvas, and a number carry dates in the 1970s, so his activity may have run later than the trade assumes. His paintings appear regularly at American auctions and in dealers’ stock, valued for exactly what they offer: an affectionate, unhurried picture of small-town America before the highway.
Jonas Bradford, the Pennsylvania folk painter known through his pictures of trains, barns and general stores; the memory-painter tradition after Grandma Moses, and a signed steam train in our gallery at 1,200 €.
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