This Mystery's For You

For those of you that have followed me lo these many years, you know of my love of vintage advertising.  It's been a while, but in those early years, I would even scan all the ads from vintage magazines and post here.

I was at an estate sale a few weekends ago and came across this original painting:

The estate was of a woman illustrator and there were other pieces of original advertising artwork by her there, though this was the most striking.  I felt it had to be original art for a Budweiser ad and when I reverse imaged the painting, this ad from 1954 came up:

But after closer examination, side by side, back and forth, I noticed some discrepancies between the ad and the original. A glove strap turned slightly up, a celery leaf out of place, a misplaced earring, wider sweat trails on the bottle, a softer nose on the woman, longer fingers on the man, and most noticeably, the bottle label with legible writing in the ad vs the painting.  But then, there are also things that are dead on; the woman's teeth particularly.

The label, I thought could possibly be explained as a change in pre-production of the ad. Maybe they had standard label overlays for all of their ads for consistency reasons?  But I wonder about the other differences.  I don't know enough about vintage printing, but is it possible things were "cleaned up"/adjusted prior to creating the printing plate for the ad?  Or is it possible the artist would have gone through an intense exercise of extensively reproducing this art as practice for expanding her career?

It reminds me of the famous story of Norman Rockwell's "Breaking Home Ties".  "Henry" comic strip cartoonist Don Trachte was good friends with Rockwell and bought his original painting for $900 in 1962.  In 2002, Trachte loaned the painting to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Curators at the museum were puzzled by discrepancies between the painting and the Saturday Evening Post cover featuring the painting.  In 2005, a year after Trachte died, his family discovered a false wall in his art studio which hid the original Rockwell painting; the one hanging in the museum was a masterfully executed duplicate.  His family believes it was done as a ruse to prevent his ex-wife from getting the original. You can compare the two here.  The original and copy now hang together in the museum.

So what do you think of my painting?  Original or reproduction?