The Girl With The Apple Cart

I 've found the perfect spot in the garden," he said. "Let's take a look together." She held her mother's hand while the artist led them to the grove of trees. He'd set up an easel with a large blank canvas, a wooden stool, and a small table laden with brushes and tubes of oil paint. Her mother had selected a simple ivory dress, the one she had worn when they all had met the week before at the house across the field. His studio was there, and after this morning, he would work on the commission at his home. He held up a wide dark pink sash for them to see. "This will look lovely on you," he said. He looped the fabric around her waist, and tied a bow at her side, draping the ends over the dress. The artist asked the girl's mother to adjust the neckline so it sat delicately on her shoulders, and to push up the sleeves a bit off her arms. Then he placed the girl's hands on the wooden handles of the cart, full of ripe red apples plucked from the orchard. "Look right at me," he told her as he picked up a brush with paint and made the first stroke on the canvas.

For years, she watched over the salon in my grandmother’s house, her gentle gaze a witness to my mother, Marilyn, playing Chopin or Beethoven on the Steinway Grand piano in the corner, guests chitchatting with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before one of my grandma, Bess’s, elaborate dinner parties, holiday gatherings with grandchildren and cousins, or quiet evenings with just Bess and Jacob, my grandpa, sitting in the armchairs by the fireplace.

Sarah Shaw, Grandma’s friend who was an antique dealer with a shop on South Orange Avenue across from Seton Hall University (where Mom would work many years later) found the painting of The Girl With the Apple Cart at an estate sale. That was simply what we called it; there was no provenance we knew of. Sarah would invite Bess to the store to browse her latest finds, pointing out a special item she thought would fit perfectly in the house. This was the early 1950’s when my grandparents had just built the house.

The large oil work depicted a sweet young girl, realistically painted, and posed with a wooden cart full of ripe apples. The painting is set in large gold wood frame with an oval cut out around the artwork. It’s a really large piece, measuring about 32”W x 42”H. It needs a substantial wall on which to hang it, and ample footage in a room, so you can step back and admire it’s beauty from a distance. It could be in a gallery or museum.

The girl has an aura of mystery about her. Who is she? Sarah must have selected the painting for my grandmother because the girl resembles my mother at that age, as I’ve seen in family photos.

My grandparent’s house on Nymph Road in West Orange had a spacious living room, and the painting was the focal point. The walls were pale pink, trimmed with white crown molding, and offset by pink floral carpeting. A curved-back couch in a striped brocade sat directly below the painting. This gave the home a formal air – you would never even think of putting your feet on the furniture.

After my mother got married, the piano followed her to our home in Livingston, and Grandma filled in the space in the corner with antique mahogany tables on either side of the couch. She kept the piano bench and had it reupholstered in an apple green shantung raw silk.

I spent many days of my childhood in my grandmother’s house, and always loved the painting and the stories it could tell.

We moved Grandma to a nursing home when she was 80. She had developed dementia, and was also diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The house was silent and empty.  We prepared to put the house on the market, selling some of her beautiful antique furniture, and packing up smaller items like the figurines and lamps. We wrapped up the painting in a large flat bed sheet I had brought home from my college dorm, and stored it in the back of the closet in the spare bedroom in our house. It had been my brother’s room, but now the closet held my business suits, and boxes of shoes. And there she sat undisturbed for the next twenty-five years, a silent observer to the drama that unfolded throughout the rest of the house. My father died the next year sending our lives into turmoil. I stayed with my mother in the house. We leaned on each other for support.

Mom wanted to retire, and she was thinking about selling the house in Livingston. She decided to have the entire house painted inside and out. That meant a make-over – of a sort – for my room, which still had the same worn out carpeting I’d had since I was a girl. This was my opportunity to be creative. I immediately thought of The Girl With The Apple Cart hidden away from our lives for all these years, and I had to see her again. I pulled everything out of the closet, and took out the painting. She was as beautiful as I remembered and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the bedroom: I would make the room a setting for the painting and hang it on the wall above my bed. We painted the walls in a light mauve to pick up the tones in the painting, and we chose neutral textured carpeting in a tan shade. My comforter already matched the colors in the painting. It was kismet.

While the carpeting was being installed and the walls were being painted, I took a close look at the painting. Who was the artist, I wondered? Was there a signature on it? In the lower left corner, on the bottom of the girl’s reddish sash, I spotted what I thought was an artist’s monogram, and a date, 1895. I couldn’t decipher the initials.

I posted photographs of the painting on a website that helps identify artwork, and asked the collective mind, if anyone could help with information. Some thought the painting’s realistic style resembled work of the 19th Century French master, William-Adolfe Bouguereau, or his student – who would later become his wife – Elizabeth Jane Gardner-Bouguereau. William Bouguereau was a French Academic artist, whose realistic and neoclassical genre paintings of women were popular in France and the United States during his lifetime. He finished some 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown. His student Elizabeth Gardner’s paintings are in a similar style and it’s difficult to tell them apart.

I took the painting to a local art framer, who I had trusted with other framing projects over the years, and asked him to take it out of the frame so we could see if there was a signature hidden underneath. There wasn’t. He reassembled the painting with the original frame, and added a fresh brown paper backing and new wiring for hanging it on the wall. There were no more clues, except the indecipherable monogram. William Bouguereau and Elizabeth Gardner signed their work with full signatures, obvious on all the known works. Another French painter, often compared to the Bouguereaus was Hugues Merle, and he sometimes used his initials “HM” to sign his art. Was the painting one of his? Or was this merely a student work “After Bouguereau”?

I hung The Girl With The Apple Cart in my bedroom, her origin an ongoing mystery, and I could sense my grandmother’s presence in our home.

We finally sold the house in 2016, and we were moving to a rental townhouse in West Orange – it would be a local move, just a few miles from the home I’d spent my whole life in. Mom and I didn’t know anything about moving. We’d been in the same house for more than 50 years. The whole moving exercise was traumatic in itself, mentally and emotionally taxing, and physically exhausting. I did most of the packing, filling moving boxes and bins. The professional movers wrapped up the furniture, and carefully packed breakable mirrors and the framed art, including the paintings (there were two more antique oils painted on glass, that hung in the living room).

In the townhouse, we unpacked slowly, room by room. I hung the painting of the girl in my new bedroom. It wasn’t really home, but the painting lent some continuity, and I tried to adjust.

In hindsight, I should have kept the moving boxes and packing materials, not thinking how soon I might need them again, but I gave them away as we emptied out each one.

After only a year and a half in the townhouse, Mom became ill again – her cancer had returned –  and she died in the Spring.

I was moving again, this time across the country to California.

I spent the next two months paring down the contents of the house, working at a frenetic pace to meet a seemingly impossible deadline, while painstakingly wrapping up breakables, and labeling boxes. The cross-country movers would crate the painting in a custom-built wood container to keep it safe during the month-long warehousing, followed by a three-week journey in the truck. They also packed the two other oil paintings, along with some of the framed art. But I packed the rest of the art and photography myself; I was becoming an expert mover.

I flew to California with four pieces of checked luggage, and my two cats in their airline-approved carriers, stowed under the seats in the cabin with me. I’d shipped my car ahead (filled with cat supplies, bedding for me, a TV, and some kitchen wares) so I’d have some essential household items while I was waiting for the moving van to arrive in a month.

On a hot August day, the van arrived. I locked the cats in the bathroom, as movers hauled hundreds of boxes and bins and unrecognizable items, wrapped like mummies, up the steep concrete staircase from the parking area.

They uncrated the painting. She had survived the travels and leaned against the wall in the large bedroom. I should have kept the crate! But the movers took it back on their truck. This time, I saved all of the oversized boxes and packing materials from the wall art and photography, and stacked them at the back of the detached garage.

The apartment was on the upper floor of a townhouse with vaulted ceilings in the bedroom. It had ample wall space for the large painting. For the next four years, The Girl With The Apple Cart once again hung above my bed, and I could see her every day. The cats kept me company, and the girl reminded me of Mom and Grandma – omnipresent in my heart.

The center would not hold. My life fell apart again, and I could not remain in the apartment. The landlord was selling, plus, I couldn’t afford to stay there. I ran out of options and was moving, without a place to go, and not much time. There was nothing else I could do. Packing was frantic. By now, I knew the drill. I bought supplies at U-Haul, pulled all the art off the walls, and packed them up with the boxes I’d stowed in the garage. I bought three specialty boxes made for televisions to use for the paintings.

The only destination this time was a 10x20 ft. storage unit. Some friends helped move a bunch of the boxes in a convoy of SUVs, but that only made a dent in moving the apartment contents out. I had to hire a moving company after all.

As a last resort, I was moving to my brother’s house and could only bring a minimal amount of my belongings. I didn’t want to store the paintings in the storage unit; it was full already. So, we put them in my brother’s garage.

And there she lies in her cardboard coffin, on a high shelf, surrounded by gym equipment and lawn tools, shuttered from the world, and from me. I am filled with infinite sadness, imagining that no one will view this painting and appreciate her beauty and her story. Is she locked away forever like the Man in the Iron Mask, forever encased in layers of plain brown paper, wrapped in copious bubble cushioning, and entombed in a carton made for transporting a 60” flat screen TV?

Will I ever see her again?