Homes & Antiques

H&A Collecting

Painting by numbers Deana David Lissenberg loves to display her collection of artists’ palettes – and to imagine the stories of the painters who once owned them Feature Rosanna Morris Photographs Jason Ingram

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n museums and art galleries the world over, crowds gather to catch a glimpse of a Van Gogh, Delacroix or Rembrandt. But for Deana David Lissenberg, it’s the tools they and other artists used to create these paintings that fascinate her. In Deana’s eyes, the rough daubs of pigment and curious, gloopy mixes of dried paint on simple, unsigned pieces of board are artworks in themselves – and ones that she uses to decorate her home.

Every wall in Deana’s bijoux Amsterdam apartment is adorned with examples from her 150-strong, mostly wooden, collection. The best take centre stage in her living room and bedrooms, while lesser examples are relegated to the loo. The rectangular and oval palettes are grouped separately, with smaller boards placed on shelves or hung around paintings.

Rare folding palettes, used for painting en plein air, are kept in boxes for moments of quiet appreciation.

But why collect artist palettes? ‘When I first started looking, a dealer in an Amsterdam antiques centre tried to discourage me, saying I wouldn’t find enough,’ says Deana. ‘He had one for sale but said it was the only one he’d seen in his decade of dealing so I passed on it.

But when, a few weeks later, I spotted another at a market in Maastricht, I went back to get it.’

Now she has so many she has to edit her collection and sell a few. She’s found them on French eBay, at shops in Massachusetts on her travels as a tour guide and on London’s Portobello Road. ‘It’s become an obsession,’ she smiles. ‘You have to put a lot of effort into looking for them. My husband and I label our breaks away by how many palettes we can find, so we’ve recently been on a three-palette holiday and a five-palette honeymoon.’ facing page The living room of Deana’s Amsterdam apartment is painted a deep maroon, which sets off a wall of palettes and oil paintings right Any nook, cranny, shelf or corner is brightened with a display of the colourful boards January 2013 H&A 73

H&A Collecting

from left Two smaller palettes share a corner with Deana’s husband’s collection of cocktail shakers and decanters; Deana found what she believes to be a 1900s impressionist’s palette on French eBay; palettes make a pretty statement arranged around a shelf of old books

‘For some artists, the management of the palette was at the core of good painting’ Deana’s best bargain, at ¤25 on French eBay, is what she believes to be an impressionist’s palette, possibly from the 1900s. ‘The brushstrokes are all so even and the colours are beautiful. I wish I owned one of the paintings it was used to paint.’ The most expensive palette Deana owns is Victorian and cost $550, and came with a paint box and supplies. ‘I saw it in an antiques shop in Maine and didn’t buy it for six months,’ she says. ‘But it haunted me so I went back for it. There was a painting in the lid of the box and, when the artist shut the lid for the last time, the paint from the palette transferred on to the painting.

It makes me wonder if he or she died before they had the chance to reopen the box.’

Deana’s all-time favourite palette was unearthed in her favourite shop in Concord, near Boston. A large, studio palette, it has suffered a violent mishap in its past, perhaps the result of a frustrated painter’s fit of rage, she guesses. Thick, dark paint is dotted down one side, while pale touches of blue, green and yellow are smeared on the other. ‘I paid $70 for it but would have paid many times that for something so special,’ she says. ‘It’s been cracked in half and then repaired. This was a left-handed painter who painted with the pigments and mixing well separated. It was just lying on the floor, propped up against a pile of rusty birdcages.’

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Deana is so enthused by her collection that she grabs one after another off her walls to show them to anyone who shows an interest – they make great conversation starters when she hosts dinner parties. ‘This one I like because someone tried to forge a signature for the artist Pierre Ambrogiani on it but it is nothing like it!’ she says.

And Deana doesn’t just love how they look on her walls: she is fascinated by the artists’ techniques and wants to understand their colour theory and painting methods. Were they ordered or messy? Did they waste much paint? Did they paint landscapes or portraits?

‘You can learn so much about a painter through a palette,’ she says. ‘If one has a lot of colours such as green, red and yellow, then it’s almost certainly a floral painter or a landscape artist. When there is an absence of green, it’s more likely to be an expressionist, who would have used blue, red and white. When you don’t have flesh colours, you know it’s not a portrait artist. If there are no skin tones and no green then it’s probably an abstract painter.

A painterly approach For some artists, such as Whistler, the management of the palette and the order of its layers of pigment was at the core of good painting. Delacroix meticulously arranged his palette, even noting in his journal in 1850 that

above The palettes are displayed on walls in every room in the apartment – even in Deana’s son Teddy’s primrose bedroom

‘my freshly arranged palette, brilliant with contrasting colours, is enough to fire my enthusiasm’. One of the best examples among Deana’s collection is a French palette that still has its sale tag, telling Deana that it was from a shop called Duprès on Faubourg Saint Honoré in Paris, still there today. Much of the board is clean and the pigments are expertly arranged in varying shades of red, black and blue. ‘The painter has separated the paint on the left according to colour, and did the mixing strictly on the right,’ says Deana. ‘It also has a scrap of English newspaper stuck to it, so I like to imagine that its owner was an English or American abroad in the late 19th or early 20th century. What an exciting time to be in Paris!’

Deana has even started writing short stories for some of them. ‘I look at a palette for a long time and try and think what the mood was and who the artist was,’ she says. One of her stories is about a forger on a cruise to the Mediterranean in the 1920s, while another features a Scottish painter and a palette made of the wood of a haunted tree. Deana can conjure up all manner of imaginings but, in truth, who used the palettes and what they painted with them will always remain a mystery – but then that in itself is all part of the fun. ✤ Read Deana’s short stories and musings about her vintiquing trips at citychateau.org

above Paint boxes are stacked neatly on the living room table, from where dinner party guests can look up and admire over a dozen different palettes right A heavily encrusted, late-Victorian folding palette that would have been used for painting en plein air (‘The paintier the better,’ says Deana) January 2013 H&A 75