Four original pen-and-ink book illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist William Steig were sold at auction yesterday in Clintondale, New York. They were originally published in Will Cuppy's book How to Become Extinct (1941), appearing in the chapter "Reptiles I'm Always Meeting." The drawings depict four snakes: The Garter Snake, The Rattlesnake, Own Your Own Snake, and The Glass Snake. The drawings have a lot of charm, especially given their reptilian subject matter. The Garter Snake image may easily be described as romantic. Pencil lines are visible throughout the set. Correction fluid was used judiciously in the bow of Own Your Own Snake.
Bidding opened at $300 online and the lot of four drawings sold at Kensington Estate Auctions for $625, well within the broad $400 to $800 estimate. These illustrations were just offered in the June 9 Illustration Art sale at Swann Galleries, where they failed to sell with a presale estimate of $1,200 to $1,800. That estimate wasn't necessarily too high; the final Kensington sale price suggests that with a reserve set reasonably at half the low estimate, the Swann sale might have been successful.
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| William Steig Kensington Estate Auctions listing accessed August 7, 2022 |
Sold:
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| William Steig Swann Galleries Illustration Art, June 9, 2022, lot 132 |
August 10, 2022 Update: Thanks to David from Manhattan for pointing out that the first edition of How to Become Extinct dates from 1941, not 1983.
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