Oct 19, 2023 - Sale 2649

Sale 2649 - Lot 5

Price Realized: $ 1,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
ALBERT ALEXANDER SMITH (1896 - 1940)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Etching on cream wove paper, 1922. 254x194 mm; 10x7 5/8 inches, full margin. Frame watermark. Numbered "#12" in pencil, lower left.

This portrait of British-Sierra Leonean composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is part of a 1922 series of prints by Albert Alexander Smith which celebrate people of African descent. Here Coleridge-Taylor is pictured with his best known composition "The Song of Hiawatha," which was later adapted by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Alexander Smith's series includes etchings of Alexandre Dumas, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Toussaint L'Ouverture.