Oct 10, 2024 - Sale 2681

Sale 2681 - Lot 147

Unsold
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500

LESLIE RAGAN (1897-1972)

RAILROADS ON PARADE / NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR. 1939.


40½x27¼ inches, 102¾x69¼ cm.
Condition B+: repaired tears at edges, one into upper text; replaced losses, creases and restoration in margins; minor abrasions in image; repaired pin holes in corners.

Among the exceptional exhibits at the 1939 New York World's Fair was the Court of Railways, "a sixteen-acre display of locomotives, trains, and the men who made them run. Twenty-seven principal railroads east of the Mississippi participated, and there were three and a half miles of track . . . in the yards stood the British-built John Bull locomotive of 1831 alongside a modern 140-foot Pennsylvania streamlined giant that ran continuously at sixty miles an hour on a roller bed . . . the highlight of the exhibit was Railroads on Parade . . . a pageant about the 'romance of transport' from covered wagon days to the streamlined trains of 1939. . . it aimed to highlight the role transportation played in the opening and development of the vast American continent" (World of Tomorrow p. 101-102).