Etching, aquatint and engraving with hand coloring in watercolor on cream wove paper, 1947. 200x303 mm; 8x12 inches, full margins. Artist's proof for an unrealized edition. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "A. P." in pencil, lower margin. A brilliant, richly-inked impression of this exceedingly scarce, early etching, with strong colors, crisp, inky plate edges and fingerprint ink smudges in the margins.
There are impressions of this subject, both with and without hand coloring, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gifted by the artist.
Rickey (1907-2002) is celebrated among the foremost American kinetic sculptors. Born in South Bend, Indiana, he was reared in the United Kingdom and graduated with a history degree from Balliol College, Oxford, where he also studied frequently at the Ruskin School of Drawing. Rickey furthered his artistic training, at the advice of his father, a Singer Sewing Machine Company executive, in Paris at the Académie L'Hote and Académie Moderne, studying modern painting and drawing. He returned to the U.S. in 1930 and began the first in a series of art teaching positions before he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army Air Force (1942-45). In 1946, Rickey returned to Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, to become the chairman of the art department (which he had help organize in 1941).
Rickey began experimenting with kinetic sculpture in 1945. His first sculpture was exhibited in New York in 1951 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art group show American Sculpture. The MoMA purchased his stainless steel sculpture Two Lines Temporal I, 1964, after then director Alfred Barr had seen it at the exhibition Documenta III in Kassel, Germany.
Rickey created the current etching, along with several other versions of the mythological subject Apollo and Daphne, while studying printmaking during the fall of 1947 with Mauricio Lasansky (1914-2012) at the University of Iowa. He left his teaching position at Muhlenberg College the following year and focused his work on sculpture from the 1950s onward, settling with his family to East Chatham, New York, by 1960, and ultimately becoming among the leading kinetic sculptors of the 20th century.
