Mar 30, 2023 - Sale 2631

Sale 2631 - Lot 75

Price Realized: $ 812
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(SLAVERY & ABOLITION.) J.E. Taylor, artist. Appealing to be Allowed to Help Fight for the Union; or The Condition in 1863. Print, 19 x 23 1/2 inches; quite worn with substantial surface loss, two worm holes touching lower right corner of image, 2-inch tape repair in lower margin, dampstaining. New York: Gwendolyn Publishing Co., 1892
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Additional Details

A newly freed man, one shackle still hanging from his wrist, reaches out to President Lincoln, while his wife and children stand behind him. In the background, a regiment of the United States Colored Troops charges into battle against the Confederates.

Edwin Adolph Maccannon (1866-1955), the designer and copyright holder of this print, was also the author of the only other work we find published by the Gwendolyn Publishing Company: a 1904 book, "Commanders of the Dining Room; Biographic Sketches and Portraits of Successful Head Waiters." He was a Black man from St. Kitts in the British West Indies who came to Brooklyn in 1884. Among his children was a daughter named Gwendolyn. Over the course of his career, he was proprietor of a publishing house, a salesman, and in 1935 was the head of the Negro Institute of Research and Economics.

We trace only one other institutional copy, at the Schomburg Library.