?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(SKETCHBOOKS.) Alma Bertha Bertsch; and/or Marguerite Bertsch. Album of approximately 60 juvenile pen and ink drawings. 4to, 10 3/4x8 3/4 inches, printed pictorial album covers, spine rebacked with plain paper and defective; sketches either loose or mounted to brittle album leaves, scattered offset and trimming. [New York City, 1897]
"Album of 1897" in ink on front pastedown: the drawings are generally skillful for a child's hand and include portraits, architecture, arbor, still-life, fashionable hats, furniture and home furnishings, nursery rhymes, seasonal allegories, birds, animals, and other late 19th-century subjects.
The names of Alma-Bertha Bertsch and Margarethe [sic] Bertsch appear at separate places in large stylized calligraphy. The two sisters were born in New York City in 1885 and 1887 respectively. Their younger brother, Karl Alfred was born in 1889; one of the drawings depicts an age-appropriate boy wearing a sailor's uniform and cap lettered "Karl". Alma Bertha spent her career as an educator and real estate broker in New York City; Marguerite also started off as a school teacher but for a brief period in the mid-to-late 19-teens she enjoyed an occupation as a screenwriter and silent film director with Vitagraph Studios, a prominent early 20th-century Brooklyn production company.
