?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
CHURCH, FREDERICK STUART. Small archive of 17 illustrated Autograph Letters Signed, "F.S. Church" or "Grandpa Church," to Evelyn Baker Schley ("Dear Eve") or her children, on various mostly personal subjects. The illustrations, mostly ink drawings, many in ink and colored pencil, a few in graphite, each a small scene or portrait, usually caricatures of one or more animals in clothing or speaking. Together 29 pages, 8vo, most written on first and terminal pages of folded sheet, a few on recto and verso of single sheet; one letter mounted to integral blank of another, minor scattered foxing to a few. (MRS) Vp, 1905-11
New York, 3 January 1905: "Don't you put all my sketches and pictures down in the cellar and out in the woodshed in your new home. Mr. Schwab the steel man just bought my pictures at the Academy of the [Fine] Arts for $1000. . . ." Rome, 22 October 1906: "I didn't pluck their flower from the Tomb of Romulus & Remus, because there isn't any. But Romulus has one in the ruins of the Forum and that's where I got it. Oh Rome is wonderful in its departed glory . . . ." Np, nd: "Imagine a Polar Bear and Cub that have been floating away on a piece of Ice. The ice grows less and the Mother Bear gives up her place to her Cub and sinks down in the ocean. Now the above picture is allegorical but just represents my feelings when you did not answer my letter . . . ." Shawnee on Delaware, 13 August no year: ". . . It is so hot here this afternoon and I have gotten so fat that I can't sink and float[;] lovely that I am writing this out in the Delaware River with three Mud Turtles and two wild Mountain Deer laughing at me. . . . "P.S. Did I write you how I was teaching the Ducks to Waddle?" Evelyn Baker Schley Behr (b. 1885) was the daughter of Church's friend and patron, Grant B. Schley (1845-1917).
