Beautiful Antique Frames

Text by Doris Athineos
Produced by Leigh Keno and Leslie Keno

Not many art lovers would be thrilled contemplating an empty frame. But when Leslie and Leigh Keno go antiquing, they keep their blue eyes peeled for the art around the art. The two favor handsome 17th-century Dutch ebonized frames like the one Leigh landed at a New Hampshire country auction for a three-digit figure. The missing portrait was replaced by silvered glass. "The frame is 400 years old, but it looks modern around a mirror," says Leigh. "It adds color and depth to a room."

High-profile Dutch ripple frames are impressive, but century-old American frames echo popular motifs prized by furniture fans (acanthus leaves, wheat stalks, rosettes) and are among the most undervalued antiques. "Dig around, and you can find 19th-century gilded wood frames for $200," says Leigh. They may be hand-carved or "composition" (a type of plaster over a wood base). "To buy that gilding today would cost a couple of thousand," he adds. Folksy, grain-painted frames also grab them. "The frames are painted dark red and decorated with black lines and swirls to look like mahogany," notes Leslie.

Of course, if a period frame still cradles its original painting, the Kenos and other art lovers prefer they stay together, especially when the artist himself designed the frame for a particular painting. "American Impressionist Childe Hassam designed his own frames and so did other artists," points out Leigh one sunny afternoon while gazing at an artful display of blank frames lining the walls at Gill & Lagodich, a downtown Manhattan period frame shop that feels like an artist's salon despite the missing pictures.

Founded by frame scholar Tracy Gill and restorer Simeon Lagodich, the shop contains some 3,000 frames, most a few centuries old. "Van Gogh, Degas, and Eakins all made their own frames," says Lagodicch, who is also a landscape painter. James McNeil Whistler called his own fluted-reed frames "as important a part as any of the rest of the work." Whistler even signed his frames (with a signature butterfly), hoping the two would never part. Even without the painting, a vintage Whistler-style frame can sell for more than $10,000.

American frame styles changed with the times and reflected regional differences. For instance, New Mexico's Taos School of painters favored frames with a Southwest patina (Roman gilding) and Native-American pottery designs. "The major American art movements, including the Hudson River School, American Impressionism, Social Realism, and Modernism, all influenced frame design," explains Gill, who has a soft spot for Aesthetic-style frames from the 1870s and '80s. "Aesthetic frames are eclectic, truly design overload," she says with a laugh. "They often look gold, but they're really burnished bronze. Some think they're too dark and Victorian, but I personally adore them." She recommends Aesthetic frames (on eBay or auctionzip.com for less than $100) for family photographs rather than paintings, where the wild patterns might compete.

Some of the earliest American frames "resemble plain window and door molding," adds Gill, a dog lover who once named a beloved Samoyed Sully, after American portrait painter Thomas Sull (1783-1872), who constructed his own bare-boned frames.

Like those early Yankees, mid-20th-century modernists shied away from curlicues and gilding. They preferred simple designs such as striations combed into gesso or wormy chestnut wood with a pale gray finish, Gill notes.

"Modernist frames from the 1940s and '50s are becoming popular," she says. The most prized were created by the Manhattan firm House of Heydenryk, founded in 1935 by framer Henry Heydenryk, who often collaborated with artists.