A Technical Survey of Florine Stettheimer’s Post-1916 Paintings

Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) began practicing as an artist in the late nineteenth century, but she is best known for the paintings she created after 1916, which memorialize luminaries and events of the American Jazz Age. Characterized by scholars as her mature work, Stettheimer’s post-1916 canvases portray pseudo-naïve imagery, rendered in a vibrant palette of paints applied with extravagant textures. For the first time, visual examination, imaging, microscopy, and scientific instrumental methods were used to analyze a broad range of Stettheimer’s mature works. The materials and techniques elucidated in this study are consistent across paintings. The artist chose a limited selection of traditional oil paints that she typically applied with palette knives to canvases prepared with absorbent layers. She sometimes enhanced her unvarnished surfaces with drawing and found objects. Two pigments she regularly used, zinc white and cadmium yellow, developed condition issues, namely severe mechanical cracking and pigment degradation. These condition issues provide challenges to conservators, and they make the technical analysis of her paintings an important component of any discussion of her work.