Frederick Ferdinand Schafer Painting Catalog

Conventions: Provenance and exhibition history

Personal holdings are listed as "private collection" unless the owner's name has appeared in public or the owner has specifically authorized public disclosure. Dealers and auction houses are normally identified. The full name and address of the dealer or auction house, if known, appears in the citations.

Note that only a handful of Schafer paintings have complete provenance. There are two main reasons for incomplete provenance. First, in most cases records of the original purchasers have not been located. As a result, paintings can sometimes be traced back to the time that the artist was active, but cannot be connected to the artist's original sale. Second, during the middle part of the 20th century, and especially just after the second world war, the professional art world considered realistic paintings of western landscapes to be inconsequential decorations, and when houses were redecorated these paintings were often given or sold to salvage dealers who were more interested in their frames. Collectors of the 1960's report finding stacks of unframed paintings in the back of junk shops, with no clue about their origins. For similar reasons, paintings often come with little information beyond "After Grandma died we found it in the attic." Consequently the provenance of most of these paintings begins with a recent owner, an antique dealer, or an auction house.

Exhibited: If the painting has appeared in an exhibition, this entry gives the name, location, and date of that exhibition. A fuller citation of the exhibition and of any exhibition catalog can be found in the citations, which are in order by the name of the exhibition. This entry includes both museum exhibitions and those assembled and advertised by galleries and dealers, but it does not include the brief exhibitions that usually precede auction sales.