Bradley Walker Tomlin watercolor surfaces at antique mall

In a booth at Weil Antiques mall in Allentown, PA, a couple of years ago i noticed a large and vivid floral still life watercolor/gouache of zinnias or dahlias in a brass pail sitting on an rush-seated ladderback chair. It looked to be American, mid- to late-1920s or early 30s, reminiscent of work by the famous modernist Charles Sheeler although not by him. The painting was not signed or dated. The price was not cheap so I hesitated to buy it, not knowing the artist and of course it would be $200 to $300 to have it matted/framed properly. I revisited it several times over the months and it was always in the booth. Finally the dealer, Arlene Rabin, brought it to a local antique show, where it was marked down a bit, so I bought it based on the fact that it still tugged at me after many months. Serendipitously, when doing research for a client on an abstract Bradley Walker Tomlin (1899-1953) painting, I dipped into a book whose appendices included a list of all of Tomlin's known paintings. It turns out that although he is known as a New York School abstract artist, in his early career during the late 1920s Tomlin did illustration work for Conde Nast publications, including half a dozen covers for House & Garden magazine (see above), featuring flowers in containers, near a window, using oranges and yellows. Several of these were published in the appendix as thumbnail b & w photographs and one was very close to mine. Not the exact composition, but the chair, pail of flowers, and scissors diagonally posed across the ladderback chair were all there. Tellingly, there were one or two other related paintings in the group. It makes sense that to create a cover illustration, an artist would create several similar or related compositions, and mine is one example of this. Lesson learned: Buy what you like; what your gut tells you is right! Signatures can be misleading. In 2017, a Tomlin retrospective circulated by the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz featured examples of the artist's magazine covers.