?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
ALBERT ALEXANDER SMITH (1896 - 1940) Harriet Tubman.
Drypoint on cream wove paper, circa 1920-22. 255x195 mm; 10x7 3/4 inches, full margins. France watermark. Numbered #11 in pencil, lower margin. A good, dark impression with rich burr of this very scarce print.
Albert Alexander Smith, a talented musician and artist, moved to Paris in 1920 after graduating from the National Academy of Design in New York. Smith was one of the few known African-American printmakers working in the early 1920s. According to Leininger-Miller, while he was in Paris, Smith made a series of portrait etchings of great black leaders, probably at the request of his patron Arthur Schomburg; in addition to this image of Tubman, he made portraits of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and Bishop Richard Allen. His artwork was also featured on the covers of the periodicals Crisis and Opportunity at the time. Leininger-Miller, pp. 210-11.
