On Facebook someone posted this photo of a Maxfield Parrish print for sale for $100. I looked at it and immediately thought it was washed out, nearly all the colors, but the blue, had been faded by the sun. I'm a big fan of old posters that sit in store windows and slowly turn blue from the sun strangling the color out of them. Here's how the picture should look.
I wonder if that poster had never seen a better reproduction. I say that because a few days after I saw this post on Facebook I was watching one of the British antiques shows. This one has antiques experts buying stuff and trying to make a profit at auction. One of them bought a Parrish print of this same painting and it was washed out similarly to the Facebook post print. He was going on about the nice quality of the print and the frame on a 70-80 year old object. The painting, titled Daybreak, has been one of the best selling prints of all time, one in every 4 houses had one, so you can imagine how many are still around. Maybe that's the problem, most of the prints around have been hung so long they're all fading, and people just don't bother with books on the man and his work. Seems like a waste of money to buy an old print that's faded instead of buying a new reproduction and framing that.
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