WHODUNIT

The Love Letter — Another History Mystery

Someone must have an answer for this

C&A RICHARDS slhoulette prints circa 1931

If you search Ebay for “C & A Richards Boston Silhouettes” you will find many examples of the two in my photo. These two were sold as matched sets, but if you look closely, you’ll see that there is something very different about them.

The one on the left came from my grandmother and is called “The Love Letter”. When I researched it, I found that it has a partner, “The Answer”. I was able to easily find that on Ebay, so I bought one for $29 recently. I was quite surprised when I opened the shipment because, unlike my grandmother’s drawing, this one is a reverse image painted on the glass, not on the backing paper. You can see the shadows in the right hand picture.

I asked my sisters if they remembered these. My oldest sister says that she remembers both hanging in our grandmother’s apartment, so it appears that they were bought as a set, though I doubt they were mismatched as what I have is. My slightly older sister thinks they are beautiful, but does not remember seeing them.

So what’s the story? Were there two versions sold at different prices? Googling gives me far too many results, so I asked ChatGPT about them. Unfortunately, it couldn’t find anything helpful.

I asked the seller where I bought The Answer about this, but they had no idea. I also used an app called Just Answer. I imagine that someday AI’s will put most of the experts there out of work, but for now it may be my best bet. I could ask every Ebay abd Etsy seller who deals in these, but there are a lot of those. Again, I think in a year or so I’ll be able to give my question to an AI who could query every one of those sellers, but we don’t have that quite yet.

Or do we? Could the Rabbit AI I talked about here do this? I think it might be able to, but I’m not going to spend $200 to find out!

Programmers Need API’s but You and I and AI Do Not

I also wonder if these were hand painted individually or simply copied over and over…