Howard Chandler Christy specialized in Edwardian era pretty-girl subjects painted with the sort of looseness popular with the American bourgeois classes of the late Gilded Age. He’s remembered today for the WW I poster captioned “Gee! If I were a boy I’d join the US Navy!” with a grinning girl wearing her brother’s sailor outfit.
Here, such fluff is abandoned for a more serious message (without abandoning the girl as object of a salacious gaze, note). He combines a 19th C allegory with a flapper, to create this rather spooky comment on modernity and its attractions and pitfalls. Some of the technical aspects are a bit iffy - weird shadow on the chest area - but the painting, taken as a whole, is to my mind his most interesting and contains some superb passages. It will be offered Dec 10 at Illustration House’s next auction; more eye candy on the site.