Harris Schrank Fine Prints

Six American Etchings: The New Republic Portfolio 1924

The complete set of six etchings, as issued in 1924, containing Marin’s rare Brooklyn Bridge No. 6 (Swaying), which appeared in only a few sets before being substituted by Marin’s Downtown the El (Zigrosser 134).

The set includes:

Peggy Bacon (1895–1987), The Promenade Deck, 1920 (Flint 47), 6 x 8 3/8 inches

Ernest Haskell (1876–1925), The Sentinels of North Creek, ca. 1923, 5 x 7 7/8 inches

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Night Shadows, 1921 (Levin 82) 7 x 8 3/8 inches

John Marin (1870–1953), Brooklyn Bridge No. 6 (Swaying), 1913 (Zigrosser 112) 10 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches

Hayes Miller (1876–1952), Play, 1919, 4 7/8 x 5 7/8 inches

John Sloan (1871–1951), Bandit’s Cave, 1920 (Morse 195), 7 x 5 inches

An exceeding rare and fine set, surely one of the earliest issued (since it contains the rare Marin print). Hopper’s Night Shadows is extraordinarily black and rich; each of the other impressions including Marin’s Brooklyn Bridge No. 6 (Swaying) is unusually fine.

This set has unusual historical importance: it includes prints exemplifying both traditional approaches to American printmaking, including those by Haskell, Miller, Bacon, and Sloan, as well as examples of important early American Modernist printmaking: Hopper’s Night Shadows and Marin’s Brooklyn Bridge No. 6 (Swaying).

In 1924 The New Republic offered readers a set of six original signed etchings along with the purchase of a subscription to the magazine. The original offering, in an advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature (December 6, 1924, p. 350), reads in part:

SIX ETCHINGS

Incomparable as Christmas Gifts

Originals – Not Reproductions: Each Proof Printed by Peter J. Platt, on Handmade Van Gelder Paper – Signed by the Artist, and Offered At Incredibly Small Cost with a Subscription to The New Republic ‘The Ablest of America’s Weeklies’ …“The difficulty with this offer is not to explain, but to refrain…Yet overstatement is almost difficult in face of the facts—the foremost of which (alone simply sufficient to testify to the quality of these etchings) is the names of the six artists themselves.” A subscription form was then appended, offering readers a year’s subscription to the New Republic, with the set, for $8 (or two years for $12; the New Republic alone was $5 a year).

The edition size is not known. In a letter to John Sloan dated January 14, 1925, Robert Hallowell, secretary of the New Republic, writes, referring to set,“These went very well up until the end of last year. Since then, however, the orders have dropped off so considerably that I think there is considerable doubt that we will ever dispose of as many as a thousand sets. Up to date the total is between five and six hundred.” (Morse, 1969, p. 221).

Marin’s Brooklyn Bridge print was planned for inclusion in the set, but after a few were printed, it was replaced by Marin’s Downtown the El. (The original cover specified the Brooklyn Bridge, but in subsequent covers this was crossed out in ink and replaced by the words “Downtown Manhattan.”)  Zigrosser, Marin’s cataloguer, suggested that perhaps the plate had broken. This is unlikely since the printer, Peter Platt (1859–1934), was America’s most distinguished artists’ printer of the period, worked alone, and it was unlikely that he would have broken a copperplate. A more likely explanation is that Downtown the El is about the same size as the other prints in the set, whereas the Brooklyn Bridge print is much larger; a plate of the same size would facilitate the printing of a large issue. Each of the plates was purchased by the New Republic, and the paper’s records for 1924–5, and probably also the plates, have been lost or destroyed.

Today, complete sets of the New Republic are rare, and those containing Marin’s Brooklyn Bridge are rarer still – indeed, they are virtually unknown to the market. Zigrosser had not encountered a set, and in his catalogue raisonne of Marin prints he guessed – incorrectly – which Marin print was initially included in it. Years later, in a correction (published in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, 1970, Vol. 1, No. 4), he noted that he had located only one institution which owned a complete set New Republic set (The New York Public Library; today the impression cannot be located), and that set included Downtown the El, not the Brooklyn Bridge. We have been unable to locate any museum or institution with a complete set (with either Marin!).

Each of the artists represented in the portfolio was important. At the time of the publication of the set, John Sloan was one of the best-known artists in America, a member of the Ashcan School, a painter represented in great museums throughout the country, and a major printmaker as well. Hayes Miller was known not only as an artist but also as a teacher whose students included the artists of New York’s Fourteenth Street School, including Peggy Bacon, an early Modernist who became a leading book illustrator (and was the youngest artist to produce a piece for this set). Ernest Haskell was already prominent in the United States and in Paris, noted as an etcher and student of Whistler. By 1924 Edward Hopper was beginning to earn recognition as one of America’s great young artistic talents; and John Marin had already been widely recognized for his role in creating some of the first American Modernist paintings and prints after the Armory Show in 1913.

This set, a great rarity in near-pristine condition and containing the original group of etchings, represents an important landmark in American printmaking.

Rembrandt  Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), The Sleeping Herdsman, 1643-44, etching and engraving, Bartsch, Hollstein 189, Hind 207, only state. In excellent condition, with small margins all around, 4 1/8 x 2 1/4, the sheet 4 5/16 x 2 1\2 inches.

Provenance:

Kennedy Galleries (with their stock number, a66794, verso)

Albertina, Vienna (with their duplicate stamp verso, Lugt 5g)

A very good/fine impression, crisply printed with the lines on the forehead of the boy distinct and burr discernible on the shading near the right border to the right of the sleeping shepherd.

Nowell-Eusticke noted that this is a “rare little plate” (RR+); the plate is not in existence and posthumous impressions are not known.

This was one of a small number of prints, each rare and probably just for limited distribution to his friends,  Rembrandt made of salacious subjects (including The Flute Player, A Man Making Water, A Woman Making Water, The Monk in the Cornfield).  Here a young couple engage in sexual play while an old shepherd just to their left covers his eye and (perhaps!) sleeps; a cow looks on.

Rembrandt Sleeping Shepherd - Detail

Rudolph Ruzicka (1883-1978), The First Church Burial Ground —1916, Color Wood Engraving.

Edition not stated. Signed in pencil. With the artist’s monogram and date in the block, lower right.

Image size 7 9/16 x 5 5/16 inches (192 x 135 mm); sheet size 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 inches (302 x 225 mm).

A fine impression, with fresh colors, on cream laid paper; full margins (1 1/4 to 2 3/4 inches), in excellent condition.

Ruzicka’s color wood engravings are rarely encountered in today’s marketplace, but are highly valued by collectors, both because of the subtlety of their design and composition, and Ruzicka’s technical mastery of the medium.

Rudolph Ruzicka was an eminent wood engraver, etcher, illustrator, book designer and inventor of typographic fonts. He came to the US from Bohemia, living first in Chicago where he took drawing lessons at Hull House and later becoming an apprentice wood engraver. From 1900 to 1902 he studied at the Chicago art institute, and in 1903 moved to New York where he worked as an engraver and furthered his artistic studies. He went on to achieve fame as a book illustrator, artist and typographer. As a wood engraver he surely was influenced by the 19th Century French master August Lepere, and in turn Ruzicka influenced generations of American artists and illustrators who worked in the difficult and exacting field of wood engraving.

$550

Rudolph Ruzicka (1883-1978)

View of Newark from Harrison —1916, Color Wood Engraving.

Edition not stated. Signed in pencil. With the artist’s monogram and date in the block, lower left.

Image size 7 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches (191 x 140 mm); sheet size 11 7/8 x 9 inches (302 x 229 mm).

A fine impression, with fresh colors, on cream laid paper; full margins (1 1/8 to 2 7/8 inches), in excellent condition.

Ruzicka’s color wood engravings are rarely encountered in today’s marketplace, but are highly valued by collectors, both because of the subtlety of their design and composition, and Ruzicka’s technical mastery of the medium.

Rudolph Ruzicka was an eminent wood engraver, etcher, illustrator, book designer and inventor of typographic fonts. He came to the US from Bohemia, living first in Chicago where he took drawing lessons at Hull House and later becoming an apprentice wood engraver. From 1900 to 1902 he studied at the Chicago art institute, and in 1903 moved to New York where he worked as an engraver and furthered his artistic studies. He went on to achieve fame as a book illustrator, artist and typographer. As a wood engraver he surely was influenced by the 19th Century French master August Lepere, and in turn Ruzicka influenced generations of American artists and illustrators who worked in the difficult and exacting field of wood engraving.

$550

Benton Spruance (1904-1967), Subway Shift; The Second Front , 1943, Lithograph.

Fine and Looney 223.  Edition:  30;  signed, titled and annotated Ed 30 in pencil. Initialed in the stone, lower right.

Image size 10 3/16 x 16 1/4 inches (368 x 486 mm); sheet size 15 1/4 x 23 1/8 inches (387 x 587 mm).

A fine, rich impression, on cream wove paper with a Signature watermark, with full margins,  in excellent condition. Printed by Cuno.

Subway Shift has of course been reproduced widely, including recently in The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, Stephen Coppel, The British Museum, 2008, reproduced p. 205.  In this publication Coppel points out that Spruance made Subway Shift as part of a “government-sponsored Artists for Victory initiative inspired by artists all over America to take up the patriotic call,” and that Subway Shift portrayed “civilians who have signed up for the home front as politically engaged citizens” (p. 30).

But my colleague Keith Sheridan points out that a close reading of the print shows its meaning to be quite different from a simple-minded “patriotic call.”  Indeed, Spruance was a socially conscious and thoughtful artist who surely had reservations about war as an instrument of policy, and probably also wondered about the unswerving allegiance of average citizens to the cause, . Focusing on the print itself, Sheridan points out that six of the subway riders are wearing pins, which might have expressed patriotic positions, but in fact are pictures of themselves!  And instead of reading “politically engaging” newspapers or journals, one is reading a Dick Tracey comic book, another a True Romances magazine. So the members of this Second Front would appear to be engaged far more with themselves and their frivolous pursuits than with serious matters of the War.

Otto Goetze (1868-1931), “Vor dem Spiegel“ – Portrait of a young woman, sitting in front of a mirror, c. 1900, etching and softground etching, signed in pencil lower right [also signed in the plate lower left]. In generally good condition, with margins, time staining and browning toward outer edges, printed in black on a cream/ivory Van Gelder laid paper, with their watermark; 8 1/2 x 6 1/4, the sheet 11 1/2 z 9 1/4 inches.

A good impression of this rarely encountered print.

Otto Goetze was a well-known painter and etcher in Berlin at the turn of the 20th Century. He studied at Leipzig and Munich Academies. After 1908 he focused entirely on etchings.

Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet (1792-1845), Tu Vois Austerlitz au Moment du Tremblement, lithograph, 1827. Published by Gihaut Freres, Paris. Reference: Fonds Francais IV, p. 336, no. 12. Printed by Villain. In generally good condition apart from foxing verso, lightly showing through image. 7 1/4 x 6, the sheet 14 1/4 x 10 1/2.

This print was included in the catalogue and exhibit Prints About Prints (Diane Ewan Wolfe, 1981, exhibit arranged by Martin Gordon and Sigma Art Fund), #8.

The old veteran of the Napoleonic wars, standing before a stand of prints, is selling his war stories; a young soldier interrupts him with Napoleon’s famous words to the troops after the victory at Austerlitz:  “Soldiers, I am pleased with you!”

Charlet was a famed 19th Century artist, well-known especially in France for his lithographs on military subjects and appreciated by other artists such as Delacroix and Gericault.