Art History News: Old Master Through Modern Prints at Swann October 30

Swann Galleries sale of Old Master Through Modern Prints on Thursday, October 30 will include Part II of the Reba W. & Dave H. Williams Collection of Color Woodcuts.

Reba W. and Dave H. Williams began their collection in the mid-1970s and amassed one of the largest most prestigious collections of American prints in the world with over 5,000 works spanning from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, the Williamses championed the history of printmaking in the United States. They were devoted to the study and promotion of the field, founding The Print Research Foundation in 2003 in Stamford, Connecticut, and organizing 18 exhibitions from their collection that traveled around the world. In 2009, they donated a large portion of their collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Part II of the collection will include Edna Boies Hopkins’s Lilies (also known as Moonfloers), color woodcut, circa 1920-23 ($10,000-15,000), and Blanche Lazzell’s Petunias, color woodcut, 1928 ($10,000-15,000).

American prints include works by Mary Cassatt, Blanch Lazzell, Edward Hopper, Bror J. Nordfeldt and Benton Spruance. Top highlights include Cassatt’s Picking Daisies in a Field, drypoint and color aquatint, 1890 ($50,000-80,000); Lazzell’s My Provincetown Studio, color woodcut, 1933 ($40,000-60,000); Hopper’s Night Shadows, etching, 1921 ($30,000-50,000); Nordfeldt’s The Skyrocket, color woodcut, 1906 ($15,000-20,000); and Spruance’s The People Work — Morning, Noon, Evening & Night, set of four lithographs, 1937 ($25,000-35,000). Works by Louis Lozowick, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Motherwell also feature. Martin Lewis, Thomas Hart Benton, Rockwell Kent, and Arthur Wesley Dow round out the selection.

Works by Old Master a run of works by Rembrandt van Rjn with Self Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill, etching, 1639 ($30,000-50,000), and The Blindness of Tobit: The Larger Plate, etching, 1651 ($30,000-50,000) leading the selection. Albrecht Dürer, Giovanni B. Piranesi, and Francisco Goya also feature.

European Modern masters include Pablo Picasso with Femme au corsage à fleurs, lithograph, 1958 ($70,000-100,000); Maurits C. Escher with Sky and Water I, woodcut, 1938 ($20,000-30,000); Marc Chagall’s Then Said the King in Himself, color lithograph, 1948 ($15,000-20,000); and Henri Matisse’s Études pour la Vierge, Visage, lithograph, 1950-51 ($8,000-12,000). Prints by Albert Giacometti, Joan Miró, Rene Margritte, Edvard Munch and more feature.