?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
CHILDE HASSAM Helen Wills at Easthampton, No. 1.
Etching on cream wove paper, 1928. 175x125 mm; 6 7/8x4 7/8 inches, full margins. Signed with the artist's cypher and inscribed "imp" and dedicated "To Helen Wells from Childe Hassam" and annotated "2nd and final state of plate which is in the Louvre" in pencil, lower margin. Ex-collection Helen Wills, Carmel, California. A brilliant, richly-inked proof-like impression of this extremely scarce etching, with strong contrasts, inky plate edges and the artist's tack holes for drying at the extreme sheet edges.
We have not found another impression at auction in the past 30 years.
Wills (1905-1998) is among the winningest American professional tennis player of all time. During a 17 year stretch from 1922 through 1938, she entered 24 Grand Slam singles events, winning 19 and finishing second three times (her wins include 4 at the French Open; 8 at Wimbledon; and 7 at the US Open). In 1928 (the year of this etching) and 1929, she won each of the majors (except the Australian Open); including the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open; and is the only American tennis player of either gender, aside from Martina Navratilova, ever to have done so in consecutive years. She was described in her obituary as, "The first American-born woman to achieve international celebrity as an athlete."
Wills was also an accomplished painter (seh exhibited frequently at New York galleries), poet and author. She drew all the illustrations for a coaching manual, Tennis, which she wrote and published in 1928.
Hassam (1859-1935) was already a celebrated American artist when he took up etching in his 50s, and produced more than 300 etchings and lithographs over a span of three decades. He spent many of his summers in Easth Hampton, on New York's Long Island, from the 1920s onward, where he met Wills and even taught her to make etchings. According to Cortissoz/Clayton, this portrait of Wills was one of Hassam's favorite etchings. Cortissoz/Clayton 298.
