John French Sloan, "Tittering Girls"

John French Sloan, Tittering Girls, 1914; private collection.

The color changes in the reproduction shown below of John Sloan's Tittering Girls are fairly extreme, and include several randomly yellow objects in the foreground and distance. Not only that, but the composition is reversed. Possibly the contemporary artist was looking in a mirror or was working from a photo that had already been flipped. In any case, the new version differs significantly from the original, where the coloring, brushwork, contrast and naturalistic details reflect the artist's usual style.

There are very few examples of the painting available, probably because it's rarely seen in public. The photo above is from a 1999 exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art. Unfortunately, the lack of authentic images has led many art fans to adopt the vastly different reproduction as the standard for this artwork.

Altered, reversed reproduction of a painting by John Sloan.

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