Q & A

L.H. of Maidenhead, Berks, UK writes:

I have five embroidery paintings from Anne-marie Matte-Desrosiers (born 1905) who lived in St-Hyancinthe, Quebec after getting married in 1942. She won an International Art Medal in 1952 in Washington D.C. She Exhibited her work at the universal exposition in New York and then in Montreal in 1967. Her work was given to Queen ElizabethII when she visited Canada.

I would like to know the value of these needlework painting now even though we would like to treasure them forever within the family.

We asked Erik Peters to respond:

She was obviously a superior talent as she was quite adept at capturing, with needle and thread, the characters of the various individuals she portrayed - the essence of portraiture. This is hard enough to do through painting with brush and pigment, a far more organic process than the more mechanical means of embroidery. Yet each of these works conveys distinct characteristics of the various sitters, from sardonic to sublime, that elevates them above the great majority of such works I have seen.

The market for such works, from a Fine Art perspective, is extremely limited and belies the inherent quality of the works themselves. They would more likely be viewed as craft than art. (Pejorative, to be sure, but a reality nonetheless!)

In the end, these pieces fall into a sort of nether-world, more than craft but not quite Fine Art. At auction, you might expect them to realize perhaps $100/200 apiece, but, as I say, their intrinsic value, I believe, would be well in excess of that. Such is the reality for such works in the Canadian market. An examination of the market in the U.S. or Great Britain, behind whom we traditionally lag in similar esoteric fields, may reveal a greater market appreciation for these, notwithstanding their Canadian origin.