Antique funeral photo that inspired Denver artist's painting taken in Rockville Centre?

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A recent painting by a Denver-based artist was inspired by a photograph of a funeral service that may have been taken in a Rockville Centre home in 1936.

Daisy Patton, who painted the piece earlier this year, was inspired by a photo that shows a man in a casket surrounded by plants and flowers. Chairs are in the foreground on either side in a room adjacent to where the man is.

“Unlike some of the other ‘deceased in a casket’ photographs, this one was positioned outside of that main room,” Patton told the Herald. “You’ve got a room within a room structure and then the chairs are kind of haphazardly scattered in the front, which I just thought was so fascinating.”

She bought the photo last September on eBay. On the back of the photograph was written, “Pop. Rockville Center home Nov. 27 1936.” It is unclear whether “Center” is misspelled or if the photo was taken someplace other than the village.

“I didn’t actually know that that was a town,” Patton said laughing, referring to Rockville Centre. “My initial thought was that it was the name of a funeral home of some kind.”

The man she bought the black-and-white photograph from, Bryan Oliver, said he does not recall where exactly he got the photo, but guessed that it came from sellers in New Jersey who he often purchases antique photos from.

“I’m always drawn to unusual subjects,” Oliver said. “Post-mortem photographs are actually very much sought after. There’s actually a big market for them, which would surprise some people.”

Patton, originally from Los Angeles, has painted since she was a child. Always interested in the relationship between painting and photography, which she referred to as “dysfunctional siblings,” she began collecting antique photographs in 2014, she said, and has a collection of about 2,000.

The untitled piece commonly referred to simply as “Rockville Center home” was part of Patton’s collection of work called “This Is Not Goodbye,” which she said was an exploration of funerary photographs — from the deceased in a casket to remembrance photography. It is an oil painting on top of the photograph, which was enlarged to life-size, she noted, “so that way there’s this sort of one-to-one reconnection with the person in the image.”

Alene Scoblete, archivist and local history librarian at the Rockville Centre Public Library, said the photo could have been taken at what was then called Joseph S. Macken Funeral Home, at 51 Oceanside Road, or George Edmund Forbell Funeral Home, at 77 Lincoln Ave.

Patton said many funerary photographs she has bought have no writing on the back, and almost never have a date, and so she was excited to find the brief description.

“It’s so weighted with this importance that I think they have this assumption that of course we’ll remember exactly who this is, and when this was and where this was, because how could we forget?” she said. “But then that means that any future generations…may not have that information.”