For its 125th anniversary, the Milwaukee Art Museum mounted an exhibition focused on its Layton Collection, a defining Milwaukee landmark and one of the first single-patron art galleries in the United States put together by collector and businessman Frederick Layton (1827–1919). The Museum entrusted Lowy with reframing several paintings in the Collection in preparation for this special event.
Layton relished contemporary European works by notable artists such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Bastien-Lepage. One piece that exemplifies how we helped the Museum achieve a spectacular fit between subject and frame is Bouguereau’s Homer and his Guide, a large oil on canvas work dating to 1874. For this work, Lisa Wyer, a senior Lowy consultant, selected an 1880s French gilt composition Barbizon-style frame with ogee profile and continuous finely detailed scrolling acanthus leaf ornamentation, almost identical in ornamentation to the painting’s original frame seen in archived photos.