Doll: "Rose Anne" c. 1937

Eugene Croe made this watercolor of “Rose Anne” at an undetermined date. It captures an old doll in a red and white checkered dress with lacey pantaloons. I really wonder what was going through Croe's mind as he painted this. Was this a beloved childhood toy, now rendered still and silent on paper? There’s something about the flat, almost naive way the doll is depicted that makes me think of early American folk art. The attention to detail in the dress, each square carefully rendered, contrasts with the doll's face, which is more ambiguous, almost ghostly. I wonder if Croe knew Joseph Cornell. Cornell collected old toys and dolls like this one and put them in boxes as if he were also trying to preserve something from his past. Anyway, artists, right? We're all just playing with the stuff of our lives, trying to make sense of it all, one painting, one box, one doll at a time.