?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
ANDERS ZORN Frederick Keppel, Art Dealer.
Pencil on cream laid paper, circa 1898. 187x145 mm; 7 3/8x5 3/4 inches, upper edge irregular. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
Provenance: The artist, Mora; the sitter, Frederick Keppel, New York, with the black ink stamp (Lugt 1023, lower left verso); private collection, Florida.
A preparatory drawing for Zorn's (1860-1920) etching, Frederick Keppel I (see Asplund 141; Hjert/Hjert 92). Keppel (1845-1912) was an important gallerist in New York at the forefront of the Etching Revival in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born in Tullow, Ireland and studied at Wesley College, Dublin. He and his family moved to Canada and then to the United States in 1862. Early on Keppel resolved to be a farmer, but he sustained an injury that prevented him from most physical labor. He remembered, "Next after farming I think I liked books best, and so I made my way to New York and engaged in that most interesting business, a bookseller's." Keppel arrived in New York and opened Frederick Keppel & Company in 1868. Though at first having no knowledge of fine art prints, Keppel found his way into initially selling portfolios. Through his relationships abroad and his ability to lecture and write about the subject, Keppel nurtured the public's interest in prints, launching numerous publications of artist's works and the Print-Collector's Quarterly in 1911. He was known to have forged friendships with the artists he represented, notably Zorn, James A. M. Whistler, Jean-François Millet, Fèlix Buhot and Joseph Pennell. Like many of those who knew Whistler, Keppel had a frought relationship with the artist, Keppel's pamphlet, The Gentle Art of Resenting Injuries was a direct, albeit entertaining, response to Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.
