Attempted Bloggery: original art

Showing posts with label original art. Show all posts

Thursday, December 8, 2022

Richard Taylor: The Fish

New Yorker cartoonist Richard Taylor's watercolor The Fish was sold at auction yesterday in Bloomfield. It is signed R.T. rather than R. Taylor, as befits its diminutive proportions. It is a humorous drawing but not a gag cartoon. The specific, unexplained scenario of a man in his pajamas kneeling at an island shore as a giant angry-looking fish swims past suggest this is a humorous illustration meant to accompany some explanatory text, perhaps a story. The man may have hoped to catch some breakfast with his bare hands, and then thought better of it.

The lot includes a completely unrelated print of St. Bartholomew being skinned alive in 69 A.D. It's hard to conceive of the collector who would want both these pieces.

Matte burn is clearly visible around the edges. Art dealer Maynard Walker established his gallery on E. 57th Street in 1935. He should have known about acid-free mattes.

The Fish
Richard Taylor
Original art

The original gallery label is from an unknown date. We do know that Maynard Walker lent a Taylor watercolor to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1941 for its Twentieth International Exhibition of Water Colors, Taylor representing Canada. It seems reasonable to date this label to the 1940s, give or take. The gallery price of $350 seems high, though, especially compared with the current presale estimate of $400 to $600 when adjusted for inflation.

Richard Taylor
Nye & Company listing accessed December 3, 2022

https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/richard-taylor-new-yorker-watercolor-291-c-f064ca6915?objectID=175761719&algIndex=upcoming_lots_prod&queryID=9b8bcd2b9aa5eb9bb6d488128bff5176

Richard Taylor
Nye & Company item description

The lot was sold yesterday by Nye & Company for just over half the low estimate.

Note: The Fish could be a magazine or book illustration, or it could be something else. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has seen this drawing in print.

I'm also interested in other original artwork by Richard Taylor. You can see the kind of things I like to post in the archives.

If you know something about the print depicting the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew and you want to tell me about it, go right ahead. I won't try to stop you.

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Thursday, August 19, 2021

Lászlo Roth, New Yorker Spot Artist

The history of New Yorker spot drawings is rife with mysteries. Far less is known about the spots than about the cartoons or covers created for the magazine. Some are by familiar names—Otto Soglow, James Thurber, Arthur Getz, Abe Birnbaum—with familiar, even unmistakeable, styles. Others, though, are by less familiar, or sometimes frankly obscure, artists. Identifying these illustrators is often challenging. Signatures may be illegible, or mere initials, or absent altogether. In my June 27 post, I noted a long-forgotten spot drawing signed with only a first name, Lászlo, from the issue of June 19, 1978. It depicts children on a camel ride, very likely the one at the Bronx Zoo. Who might Lászlo be, I wondered. There are any number of artists with the name, but none is widely known for working at The New Yorker.

Or so I thought. The answer, I believe, was to be found all along on eBay. A series of original works of greeting card art by illustrator Lászlo Roth (1921-1996) had been listed on the auction site since at least October of 2020 and was eventually sold for an undisclosed price (less than $200) on July 19, 2021. Promisingly, Roth signed his name Lászlo with an acute accent over the á (but not the o).

The eBay listing identifies him as a New Yorker artist and, in this case, that might even be accurate. Lászlo's technique seems very versatile, and his style shifts from one group of subjects to the next. Unfortunately, the eBay listing gives no examples of the artist's work on scratchboard, which is apparently what he used for the New Yorker spot. Still, he seems to be the Lászlo we're looking for.