The Fat Gold Gallery
Often, we incorporate public domain artwork into the magnets on the tins we send to our subscribers. Here’s a record of the artwork we’ve used.
May 2018
Dish of Iced Summer Fruit (source). Ding Fuzhi, 1945. Painted in China. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of public domain artwork.
September 2018
Garden Gathering (source). Artist unknown, 1640-1650. Created in Iran, probably Isfahan. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of public domain artwork.
June 2019
Girl With Watermelon. Sonia Delaunay, 1915. You can read more about Delaunay here—she’s wonderful.
September 2019
Selections from the catalog of the Hirayama Fireworks Company of Yokohama, Japan, published in the 1880s. You can find beautiful PDFs scanned by the Yokohama city library here.
June 2020
This shipment’s magnet, designed and drawn by Kel Troughton, was inspired by the designs of fruit crate labels from the first half of the 20th century. You can read more about their history in this blog post. You can find tons of beautiful examples on this website.
September 2020
This shipment’s magnets used public domain botanical illustrations, chosen to represent the signature aromas of each oil.
For the picual with its tomato leaf aroma, we used this illustration of a tomato plant from the book Hortus Romanus Juxta Systems Tournefortianum Paulo published 1772-1793, part of the digital collection of the New York Public Library.
For the coratina with its green almond aroma, we used this illustration of an almond plant and pod from the book Pomologie française published in 1846, provided by the amazing Biodiversity Heritage Library.
December 2020
Engine House and Bunkers (source) was painted by Austin Mecklem in 1934 with the support of the Public Works of Art Project program, part of the New Deal. You can learn more on the website of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
March 2021
Spring (The Procession – A Chromatic Sensation) (source) was painted by Joseph Stella in 1914-1916. Joseph Stella bounced between New York City, Paris, and his native Italy; two of his painting were included in the landmark Armory Show, the first large exhibition of modern art in America.
June 2021
Neapolitan Song (source) painted by Joseph Stella (yes, him again!) in 1929. We had bookmarked this painting during the search for March’s art (above) and agreed, “This image is pure summer.” When the June shipment rolled around, we went looking for other options… but found we couldn’t shake the appeal of this painting.
December 2021
The Double Bass Player (source) etched by Alphonse Legros circa 1873. This shipment’s olives came from a grove farmed by a former classical musician—an upright bass player, in fact!
March 2022
The Harvest (source) painted by Josep Maria Sert sometime before 1924. We love this painting’s rich colors, the sense of the whole team working together… along with the slight feeling of peril. (Josep Maria Sert also painted, under dubious circumstances, the mural that adorns the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.)
June 2022
A woodcut (source) designed in the 1500s at Christophe Plantin’s workshop in Antwerp, at that time the largest in the world.
September 2022
A poster by Harry Herzog (source) created between 1936 anf 1941 for the Works Progress Administration. For our magnet, we altered the colors and cropped out the headline, which you can see below: FORGING AHEAD.
December 2022
Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain, one of a pair of six-fold screens, made with ink and gold and silver foil on gilded paper, produced in Japan in the 1600s. Wow!
March 2023
The Deluge, a lithograph by Charles Guilloux published in 1893, in the magazine L’Estampe Originale. A perfect match for this wet, wet winter in California.
June 2023
The butterfy and the moth, a drawing on thin handmade paper by Hokusai, who you might know from other works. The drawing was produced between 1830 and 1850. We recolored this one for the magnet; we suspect the original, shown below, has faded over time.
September 2023
The Sun is a mural by Edvard Munch produced in 1909 for the University of Oslo. Compare this image’s vibe to that of Munch’s most famous painting!
December 2023
This woodblock print of a monkey in a persimmon tree was produced by Ohara Koson sometime between 1900 and 1930. He was part of the shin hanga, or “new prints,” movement, a 20th century revitalization of traditional ukiyo-e art. You can see tons more of his work over here.
March 2024
This terrific pattern is the work of Emile-Allain Séguy, a designer of the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements whose whole archive is well worth exploring. You’ll find more fabulous patterns, many of which seem like they could have been designed yesterday—along with bugs, bugs, BUGS!
June 2024
This drawing is the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a painter and sculptor who often depicted these funky, rough-hewn figures. Just look how much life and energy he creates with so few lines!
September 2024
This ukiyo-e print is the work of Utagawa Hiroshige, one of the great masters of the medium. This summer’s notably warm weather brought a lot of dragonflies to our yard, so when we came across this print, it felt appropriate. (Here’s the RISD Museum’s whole collection of Hiroshige prints.)
Get ready… it’s a tall one:
December 2024
This watercolor painting is the work of Georgia O’Keeffe:
She produced it in 1917, just before moving to New York City to begin her pathbreaking career in earnest. If you’re familiar with O’Keeffe’s famous flower paintings but don’t know much else about her, it’s well worth your time to scan her Wikipedia entry—she had quite a life!
March 2025
For this batch, we featured Ohara Koson’s moody Egret Standing in Rain, printed in 1928, in commemoration of some special visitors:
During the harvest, a family of elegant egrets flocked near the Fat Gold mill. We haven’t seen them around previously, but California’s climate has only recently bounced back from drought—there’s more water around these days.
We’d often see the egrets in the morning, bright flashes of white rising through the dense fog that is winter’s signature in the San Joaquin Valley. We’d point and watch through the window as they lofted and disappeared. We hope they come back next year; there’s another magnet in it for them, if they do. Somebody tell the egrets.
June 2025
This batch’s magnet adapts a painting by Nikolai Astrup from 1912 titled Bonfire celebrating Midsummer Night:
Astrup was a painter and printmaker who lived most of his life in Jølster, a village set among Norway’s western fjords. He was prolific across many styles; you can find huge collection of his work at the National Museum of Norway.
We chose this painting both for its drama, and to commemorate the season—it’s almost midsummer as we’re sending this batch.
September 2025
Looking for an autumnal image, something a bit more sedate than the summer’s bonfire, we stumbled across this painting in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago:
We loved the look of it—the bold, shimmering brushstrokes—and we loved the painting’s weird provenance, too. It was produced by an “imitator of Vincent van Gogh” the Art Institute tells us; that’s all.
Did this anonymous imitator in the Netherlands, circa 1853–1890, ever imagine their work would end up on your refrigerator? What a world.
December 2025
This batch’s magnet uses Store in the Rain, a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from 1927:
We love the colors… plus, the atmosphere matches our late harvest weather: rainy, rainy, rainy!