?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
AUGUSTA SAVAGE (1892 - 1962) Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp).
Cast white metal painted gold, 1939. Approximately 270x240x100 mm; 10 3/4x9 1/2x4 inches. Stamped signature and "Worlds Fair 1939" at the base. Published by Augusta Savage Studios, Inc., New York, with the studio printed paper label on the base underside.
Provenance: Daniel Webster Perkins, Esq., Jacksonville, FL; thence by descent, private collection, Florida.
Daniel Webster Perkins (1879 - 1972) was a prominent attorney in Florida and one of the state's first African American lawyers, having been officially admitted to the Florida Bar in 1914. After practicing law in Knoxville, Tennessee and Tampa, Florida, he settled in Jacksonville in 1919, where he practiced until his death in 1972. Mr. Perkins was a strong proponent of civil rights and a community leader; in 1968, the former Colored Lawyers Association of Jacksonville changed its name to the D.W. Perkins Bar Association in honor of Perkins, who had been a founding member. During a family vacation to the 1939 World's Fair, Perkins purchased Savage's souvenir replica.
Exhibited: Through Our Eyes 2000; Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Ritz Theatre LaVilla Museum, Jacksonville, Florida, February 8, 2000.
Augusta (Christine Fells) Savage was born in Green Cove Springs, just south of Jacksonville. After first exhibiting her sculpture in Palm Beach and Jacksonville, Savage moved to New York to study sculpture. She was admitted to the Cooper Union School of Art in 1921, and completed the four year course in three years. In 1929 and 1931, Savage was the recipient of two successive Rosenwald Grants, which enabled her to travel to France and study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. When she returned to New York in 1932, she opened the Savage School of Arts and Crafts in Harlem, where her students included William Artis, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. In 1935, she was a founding member of the Harlem Artists Guild, and from 1936 - 1937 she worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project as the Director of the Harlem Community Art Center.
A life-size version of Lift Every Voice and Sing was commissioned by the 1939 New York World's Fair committee in 1937. Savage left the WPA to work on this monumental project, inspired by Jacksonville brothers James Weldon and Rosamund Johnson's anthem Lift Every Voice. Her iconic sculpture stood almost 16-foot high, in painted, cast plaster on the grounds of the fair. Sadly, the original work was destroyed when the fair was over - it is known today only from photographs and these smaller versions which were cast by the artist to be sold as souvenirs.
