Edwin — Collecting Maxwells is something Julia and I fell into partly as a quest for knowledge and partly as a way to brighten up our living space wth unique art we both love. The first one was an impulse buy and the second was a wild early dating coincidence. At some point we decided we needed to know more about Maxwell and that we would love to have further examples of their kitschy work. Now we are blessed with a large and growing family of the rascals.

The first one acquired is dated May 2, 1967 and was purchased a few years before Julia and I met. Kim Cooper, my roommate at the time, and I used to go thrifting fairly often. She has a superior eye for finding rare and interesting artifacts, often items I had just walked past without realizing what I had missed. On this particular day she noticed I was mesmerized by a framed portrait, but wasn’t making any move to get it. She convinced me I should buy it, if I really liked it, no matter how silly a purchase it seemed. If memory serves, it was only $15. When I got it home, I cleaned up the frame and the glass, made sure everything was completely dry and then removed the artwork from the frame. I was half expecting to find out it was a print and was thrilled to discover it was an original chalk and pastel piece. I touched a tiny spot and the tip of my finger came away gray and powdery. I put it back under glass before I had a chance to completely ruin it. I found a place of honor to hang it in the living room and it has been there pretty much ever since. The couple in the illustration scream 1967 to me even though they are far removed from pop sensibilities prevalent at the time. I was twelve during the Summer of Love and was doing everything I could to be a part of the music scene my older brother was living. I used gaudy fabric to turn my bluejeans into bell bottoms. I had the barber box off my hair instead of fading it. I talked my mom into getting me a yellow and orange paisley Nehru jacket as part of my back to school attire. It was a real struggle, though; my parents were as square as a pizza box. They were cool in their own way, of course. They even had a matchy-matchy Hawaiian print dress and shirt my mom made that they wore to a few luaus around that time. I never tire of telling people who see this particular Maxwell for the first time, “No, it’s not my parents. I wish!”

If we hadn’t found the second one, we probably would never have thought to look for more. Julia and I had been dating for a short while and were still getting to know each other. One of our shared interests was going to flea markets. We both prefer smaller ones and so one lovely Sunday we found ourselves at the Glendale Community College Swap Meet. It’s nice to feel like you’ve seen everything without spending the whole day in the sun. I don’t remember who saw it first, but there was no doubt whatsoever that, once we did, it was going to leave the lot in the car we had arrived in together. There was definitely a stunned, deer in the headlights moment where we were looking at the signature, checking out the general vibe, talking about the difference in the dates and marveling at the odds of finding a second portrait by the same artist we knew absolutely nothing about. I bought it and, again, it was hung in a very prominent spot, this time in the hallway between the bedrooms. The artistry involved in rendering the lovely lady in horn rimmed glasses is a little less polished than that of the couple who posed for Maxwell twelve years later. Coincidentally, this piece is dated December 29, 1955, which was my mother’s birthday when I was nine months old (We later realized that two of the other Maxwells are dated with Julia’s mom & dad’s birthdays).

Julia — I was not that crazy about the first one that Edwin had when I met him. The couple looked pretty dull to me, and the frame was kind of ugly. I thought it was like the art version of a Sears photo portrait. But when we found the second one at Glendale Swap Meet, I also became totally hooked. The woman seemed more interesting, and I found it intriguing that it had been framed in Ohio.

The German Shepard was a big surprise, and is still one of my favorites. It was our first ebay find. At that point (maybe 2011?) we hadn’t seen any dogs yet. And it’s one of the largest, also.

At some point I put in a “watch” on ebay. Sometimes years would go by with nothing. Once, it had been about 2 years, and I was taking classes to get my paralegal certificate. I hadn’t even been checking the ebay search, because I was just too busy. Our class got locked out of our room, so I was sitting in the hall with time to kill. On a whim, I looked at ebay, and there was the woman with her poodle! I was so excited! 

Finding that one got me started watching the ebay results again, and some months later (when we were out of town for our wedding reception!) a Maxwell appeared. A beautiful, elegant woman with bare shoulders. This has a place of honor over our couch. The seller was from Colorado, but said that a friend had bought it for her in Palm Springs.

In 2013 or 14, when I had a bit of free time, I spent an afternoon at Central Library in DTLA to pour through old phone books from around the LA and Palm Springs area, to see if I could find any listings for portrait studios that had the name of Maxwell. The portraits seem too finished for a fair or amusement park caricature, and the subjects too dressed up. It feels like they deliberately made appointments to sit for their “family heirloom” portrait. But I had no luck in finding any such listings…..

In the next few years, we found a few more portraits. A woman who they said was from the 40’s, but the hairstyle was definitely 60’s (they misread the sloppy 6 for a 4). A matching couple in profile who are oddly both facing the same direction…..

Our last eBay finds were the only two that were unframed (and still are, due to us not getting around to it yet). They came from the same seller, but are 13 years apart. The older woman is from ‘64, and the younger woman from ‘77 (the newest date of any we own).

Yet the back of this portrait has this written on it….

Are these both the same woman, and the later portrait taken from an earlier photo? Any guesses?

The 1950’s seem to be his/her prime, as these appear to be the “best” quality and definitely my favorites. We had thought that the earliest we have is the woman in the red dress from 1952, but recently realized that the 5 & 2 were the month and day. It really fits with the other 50’s pieces, though. We found her at a bookstore at the Brewery Arts complex in our neighborhood that was just a few doors from the restaurant we frequented at least once a week. We had no idea the store was there until we took the bi-yearly open studio tour. The store was moving to a much smaller space a few weeks later. Our friend Dan Kane (who was visiting from Ohio) looked up on the wall and recognized that it was a Maxwell! The owner said that the piece was one of the few left that he had gotten from the Amok books offices. After we got it, my interest was revived and I did an internet search and found a pair of poodles from 1969. Very kitschy and cool!

The Ones That Got Away---

One of the paintings that came up on ebay was a huge tiger portrait from a seller in Pennsylvania. She wanted something like $450 for it. I think at one time she went down to maybe $300, but that was still way more than we thought was rational. We talked about messaging her and explaining that we were the only bidders on every Maxwell we had ever seen, and that we had paid no more than $100 for any piece, but we didn’t want to piss her off by seeming like we might be trying to rip her off by telling the truth. I kept a watch on it for a long time, and then she stopped relisting it. I thought I took screenshots, but now can’t find them. Now I regret not following through and contacting her. We were busy with our lives and missed that opportunity…… 

The seller of the 1960’s woman that we got from Oregon said they had gotten it at an estate sale. There was a matching man, but someone else snatched it up.

Someone had gotten one at a thrift store in Michigan of a couple, that they posted on the Weird, Secondhand Finds page on Facebook. I again forgot to get a screenshot and can’t find it now….ugh! It looked to be 1960’s era, if I remember right.

Edwin — Two things that have kept the search for more Maxwells interesting is the variety of subject matter and the wide date range the artist was active. We currently have twelve of these beautiful strangers. The first one we got is of a couple and it’s the only one we have with a man and a woman together. The man in the first one is wearing glasses. The woman in the second one we scored is wearing glasses. None of the others depict someone wearing glasses. Three depict dogs, but they are each unique; one is of a single german shepherd, one is of a pair of perky white poodles and the other is of a lovely young gal with a grey poodle. We picked up two at one time that are of a couple drawn on separate sheets on the same day, which are the only ones we have that are done in profile. (Why in the world are they not looking at each other??) There is exactly one in which the subject’s body is turned sideways and the lass has swiveled her head to look at the artist, making her shoulder more prominent. In all but one, the model’s head takes up roughly one quarter of the scene, but in that other, the gal’s head takes up roughly one half of the available space. The earliest one we have so far is from 12/29/55 and the latest is from 9/25/77. In that time I went from nursing and wetting my self to playing bass in a punk rock band. I was pretty long in the tooth for that role at the time too! In that time Maxwell’s style, somewhere between the barker at amusement parks that captures a few characteristics of your child within fifteen minutes and the artiste who works with oils and heads of state, hadn’t evolved very much. We got excited when we picked up our most recent piece because we thought it was done in 1952, which would have stretched the window a bit more. We’ve since realized the most likely scenario is the work was done on the second day of May, but either the year was never added or was very cleverly covered over after the fact… but WHY?? 

Edwin Letcher & Julia Devine

July 11, 2020