Who is This Girl and Who Painted Her?

Cleaning out the attic last year I found a pile of old picture puzzle pieces midst the broken bits of plaster keys atop the laths that had probably fallen out the bottom of their long rotted cardboard storage box. The house was built in 1912 and the pieces looked about the same age. Intrigued, I cleared off the kitchen table and assembled as much as I was able to find (a task that wound up occupying several days and attracted help from friends: there was no guide at all to what the image was as we pieced it together).

Amazingly, there were few orphan pieces when we got done (pieces that didn't attach to the main assembly), although nearly a third of the puzzle is missing. And there's definitiely enough to ID the painting, although any signature on the painting is lost to the missing pieces.

But what painting is it? A search of such terms as "Girl Reading", "Girl in a Blue Dress", "Girl In A Purple Dress" etc. turns up many images, none of which are anything close to this image.

I also posted this query more than a year ago on an art forum. To date it has received exactly one reply there: "Don't know".

Anyone out there have any ideas?

 

Thanks, amm0, I've tried innumerable combinations including those. Most art search venues on the web expect the seeker to know who the artist was; they don't have facilities for describing the subject, especially a fragmented subject.

The painting has to be famous (or was famous at one time), else why make a production run of jigsaw puzzles of it?

Then, again, perhaps it was a painting made specifically for a puzzle, much as jigsaw puzzles today feature photographs taken specifically to make a puzzle and don't appear in any other venue. Hmmm. Didn't think of that. I wonder if a search down that corridor will get somewhere ...........

 

My research so far indicates that this puzzle would have little value, not because it's missing so many pieces (albeit that does diminish its value), but because it's a diecut cardboard puzzle, probably made sometime between 1930 and 1945, when tens of millions of these were cranked out and sold for a dime. The valuable antique puzzles are made with wood pieces.

That's not to say I haven't got some rare edition, but the odds are against it. I also committed something of a sacrilege that would kill whatever value it did have: its pieces do not interlock, and with so much of the puzzle vanished the only way I could achieve the construction I did was to glue the pieces together along their joining edges. I will be an unhappy camper if it turns out the puzzle was one of 5 made in 1919 and any surviving unsullied piece worth $489.95, but I'm not losing sleep worrying about it.

I do find it interesting that such an easily described image: "girl seated in a blue dress reading" should prove so difficult to find.

 

Thank you, Trebuchet, I will give them a try.

 

Imagine our disappointment after all the effort of getting it assembled to find it devoid of body paint, or even a hint of well turned ankle