SUDBURY, Mass. – Rare prints from the remarkable collection amassed by Winfield Robbins (1841-1910) of Arlington, Massachusetts came for sale at Tremont Auctions on February 25. During his travels to Europe, Robbins collected some 150,000 prints that he later left to his hometown. After recent approval was given to deaccession, selections from this extensive collection will be offered by Tremont Auctions in upcoming sales.
The financial highlight was a mezzotint of one of the so-called ‘Four Indian Kings,’ the native American chiefs that visited London in 1710. Based on a series of official portraits commissioned by Queen Anne from the Anglo-Dutch artist John Verelst (1648-1734), these are considered the earliest known surviving portraits from life of the native people of North America.
This example, from a series by John Faber the Elder, is titled On Nee Yeath Tow No Riow or King John of Canajoharie. He was one of three Mohawk chiefs from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) alliance and one Mohican from the Algonquin nations who were received in London as diplomats and were transported through the streets of the city to St. James Palace in royal carriages. The print was expected to bring $2,000-$3,000, but sold at a muscular $29,000 ($36,830 with buyer’s premium).
Two other mezzotints from the series, including Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperour of the Six Nations engraved by John Simon and Coning vande Maquas alias Coning Brant engraved by Peter Schenk the Elder, were sold by the auction house in August. They made $12,000 and $16,000, respectively.
The portrait of the venerable Congregational minister Cotton Mather, published by Peter Pelham in Boston in 1727, is considered the first American mezzotint. Pelham was already regarded as an accomplished engraver and artist when he arrived in Massachusetts from London, but Mather was his first subject on American soil. Though he posed for Pelham’s painted study (which is part of the collections at the American Antiquarian Society), the minister would not live to see the final mezzotint as he died four months before the print’s publication. The copy here sold for $4,200 ($5,334), well above its estimate of $400-$600. Another example sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2021 for $4,000.
A portrait of Albert Einstein by German Jewish artist Hermann Struck (1876-1944) earned $4,600 ($5,842 with buyer’s premium). A specialist in etchings, Struck made a number of portraits of Einstein as well as other great minds of his generation including Wilde, Nietzsche, Freud, and Ibsen, but this relatively youthful image is thought to be the earliest. Published around the time the experimental confirmation of the theory of relativity in November 1919 had made front-page news across the world, it is perhaps the earliest attempt to commercialize an artistic image of Einstein. Numbered 20 of 150, this is one of the 50 in the edition also signed and dated 1923 by Einstein himself in pencil at the lower right.
Some of the day’s strongest prices were for Japanese woodblock prints. These included an 1892 album featuring a complete set of the 36 Ghosts series by the Meiji master Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Bound in silk brocade covers, this copy, estimated at $5,000-$7,000 but sold at $16,000 ($20,320 with buyer’s premium), includes a title page and the publisher’s Imperial commendation page. Thirty-Six New Forms of Ghosts was the last major woodblock print series by Yoshitoshi. At the end of his life he revisited the popular tales of ghosts, demons, and the supernatural from Japanese folklore that he had drawn previously in his twenties. Pushing the medium of the woodblock print to its limits, he used students to assist in the carving of 12 different color blocks for each design. It was published in parts between 1889 and 1892 by Sasaki Toyokichi and again by Matsuki Heikichi in 1902.
The complete set of Thirty-two Aspects of Customs & Manners (Fuzoku sanjuniso) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi hammered for $13,000 ($16,510 with buyer’s premium) against an estimate of $2,000-$3,000. This series, published in 1888, amounts to a survey of bijin (female beauties) of different backgrounds and occupations from the reactionary Kansei era (1789-1800) to the more open Meiji restoration (1860-1912). The word for ‘Aspect’ or ‘Type’ or ‘Appearance’ (sô) had been famously used by earlier artists such as Utamaro and Kunisada. A technical term borrowed from physiognomists who analyzed character on the basis of physical facial features, it could also mean ‘flower.’
