Portrait of a Man with a Pipe

Dimensions · 17 × 13 in (sight) · 24 × 20 × 2.5 in (framed)

Material · Oil on canvas

Frame · Original to the piece. Solid wood, deep moulding, heavy in the hand — not a modern replacement.

Era · Undated. A Los Angeles framer's stamp of the early 1920s is the earliest point we can document.

Origin · Not recorded. Signed "M. Wagner" lower right — a German hand, Munich genre tradition.

Condition · Very good for its age. Fine craquelure across the surface, light scratches in the varnish, small flecks — all shown in the detail photographs, all left as found. Canvas unlined, on its original stretcher, paint layer stable.

A bearded man sits with his pipe in the half light, painted with the patient attention the Munich genre painters gave to ordinary faces. The broad felt hat, the teal neckerchief and the long porcelain-bowl pipe place him in the Tyrolean tradition that occupied European studios through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, where a single well-observed head was subject enough for a whole picture.

What drew us to it is on the back. The stretcher bars carry the stamp of Robert de Land Co., picture framers at 415 South Main Street, an address recorded in the Los Angeles city directories of the early 1920s. However far the painting travelled to get here, it was stretched and framed a few miles from where it now hangs, on a block of downtown that has since disappeared entirely. He signed the lower right corner M. Wagner, a name the reference books have not caught up with, and that quiet anonymity leaves the man and his pipe to do the work it was always meant to do.

A painting's face is what it was made to be; its back is the record of where it has been. Specialists read it first — the stamps, labels and inscriptions that accumulate across a century and say whose hands a picture passed through. The Getty describes the reverse of a painting as "a passport for a work of art, showing where it has been during its life." Most pictures this old have lost theirs somewhere along the way. This one still carries its own, legible on the original stretcher, and we have photographed every mark.

Delivery · Pickup, local delivery and shipping options for works of art are outlined in our Store Policies. Please review before you purchase. Shipping and delivery are quoted after purchase and paid by the customer. For questions before you purchase, please contact hello@sojournvintage.com.