Fortune's Bounty: Ronald Searle Original New Yorker Cover Art

The Angel of Fortune has bestowed its bounty on the deserving and the undeserving throughout the history of art, but it has never quite appeared as it does in Ronald Searle's cover for The New Yorker of August 13, 1990. Here both angel and mortal are cats and the Horn of Plenty is filled with something felines can truly appreciate. Searle's original art was sold on New Year's Day in Southampton, Pennsylvania.

Ronald Searle
Stephenson's Auction listing accessed 13 hours before the sale

https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/195157907_ronald-william-fordham-searle-illustration-art

Sold!

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The Owl and the Pussycat: Ronald Searle Original New Yorker Cover Art

The Owl and the Pussycat, beloved characters from Edward Lear's nonsense verse, make an appearance in Ronald Searle's New Yorker cover of July 27, 1992. In Lear's telling, they "went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat," but here they take that boat out onto Central Park Lake. Yesterday, the original Searle art was sold by Stephenson's Auctions of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The presale estimate was $300-$500 with the bidding starting at $150, absurdly low numbers all around. Seventeen potential bidders watched the item.

Ronald Searle
Stephenson's Auction listing 13 hours before the sale

https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/195157908_ronald-william-fordham-searle-illustration-art

Sold! (To an internet bidder.)

Note:  For further reading, see the blog's 2020 post on Arnie Levin and Ronald Searle: The Owl and the Pussycat and The New Yorker. It's an old favorite of mine.

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W. B. Park: Charles, By the Clock

It just so happens that the very first of the original New Yorker cartoons offered by eBay seller Henning Fine Art in its current run of works from the estate of W. B. Park had been published with an exceedingly long caption. The words are not spoken but instead delivered in the form of a detailed minute-by-minute summary of the action in mock-documentary format. It's practically time-stamped. I recall that it sold in the same range as Park's other New Yorker originals, around $205; in other words, there was no surcharge for all the outsize prose.

     8:28: Charles stood up and strode into the kitchen. Everything was in readiness. He selected a fresh piece of stone-ground whole-wheat bread and balanced it carelessly in his left had. Behind him the electric wall clock hummed quietly. The peanut butter spread easily across the bread, Charles expertly turning the knife this way and that, guiding the creamy paste around the surface. The grape jelly proved more of a challenge, but he was equal to it. At precisely 8:30, he settled back into his chair, back into his reverie, back into the doubleheader.
W. B. Park
Original art
The New Yorker, October 3, 1988, p. 99

Detail, left

Detail, right, with W. B. Park's signature

W. B. Park
eBay listing c. mid-2024 archived on Worthpoint

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/original-yorker-illustration-drawing-4741038895

8:28: Charles stood up and strode into the kitchen. Everything was in readiness. He selected a fresh piece of stone-ground whole-wheat bread and balanced it carelessly in his left had. Behind him the electric wall clock hummed quietly. The peanut butter spread easily across the bread, Charles expertly turning the knife this way and that, guiding the creamy paste around the surface. The grape jelly proved more of a challenge, but he was equal to it. At precisely 8:30, he settled back into his chair, back into his reverie, back into the doubleheader.
W. B. Park
The New Yorker, October 3, 1988, p. 99

     8:28: Charles stood up and strode into the kitchen. Everything was in readiness. He selected a fresh piece of stone-ground whole-wheat bread and balanced it carelessly in his left had. Behind him the electric wall clock hummed quietly. The peanut butter spread easily across the bread, Charles expertly turning the knife this way and that, guiding the creamy paste around the surface. The grape jelly proved more of a challenge, but he was equal to it. At precisely 8:30, he settled back into his chair, back into his reverie, back into the doubleheader.
W. B. Park
Original art
The New Yorker, October 3, 1988, p. 99

With an advertisement for DeBeers and a cartoon by W. B. Park

https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1988-10-03/flipbook/098/

Note:  Here then in the archives is an original cartoon by George Booth, possibly unpublished, with another of those very long captions you've been hearing so much about. 

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