Highboy c. 1938

This watercolor, titled Highboy, was painted by Charles Squires, though we don’t know exactly when. Just looking at it, I wonder, what’s the relationship between Squires’s painting and the real thing? I can imagine him, perched on a stool, squinting, trying to capture every detail. The challenge of translation, right? How do you turn a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional image? How do you convey the weight and texture of the wood, the gleam of the brass handles? Look at the way he’s handled the wood grain – all those swirling, intricate patterns. It’s like he's trying to understand the highboy not just as an object, but as a thing with its own history, its own story etched into its very surface. He must have been totally absorbed. You can almost feel him wrestling with it. Painters are always in dialogue with each other, even across generations.