?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
(PICTORIAL MAPS -- ORIGINAL ARTWORK.) William Henry Cotton. Carriers of the New Black Plague. Pastel and printed clippings on artist's board. 19x29 3/4 inches sheet size, 16 1/4x28 3/4 inches sight, 22 3/4x35 1/2 framed; mounted to original passepartout window with printed caption pasted on; matting a touch soiled, artwork fine. Np, [1938]
Cotton's original illustration for the map which was reproduced as the double-page centerfold in the first issue of Ken magazine, an anti-Fascist publication released in April 1938. There are no apparent design changes from our finished maquette to the printed map, though the present model is a full third larger than the magazine spread. The map satirizes dictators looming large around the globe, though their pointed mockery is undoubtedly put on by a deserved heightened level of political concern: history knows how circumstances escalated in the following years.
William Cotton was an American caricaturist and illustrator whose regular contributions to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker earned him recognition and public praise; this image may be his most iconic and widely proliferated composition.
