Jan 23, 2014 - Sale 2337

Sale 2337 - Lot 160

Price Realized: $ 1,536
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
57TH CENTURY MANHATTAN WINSOR McCAY.
The Last Day of Manhattan. Pen and ink on paper. 210x415 mm; 8 1/4x16 1/2 inches. Preliminary drawing illustrating a story by John Kendrick Bangs published in the New York Herald (Sunday, February 26, 1905). Signed in pencil, lower right. Slightly dust-soiled, crease from folding.

Additional Details

"The Bangs newspaper piece illustrated by McCay . . . revolves around the creation of a fantastic imaginary piece of scientific equipment, The Spectrophone. This object allowed the viewer to look ahead and see into a specific future time . . . In various newspaper installments on The Spectrophone accompanied by McCay illustrations, Bangs chronicled how advertising had proliferated in the subway by 1907; what the public libraries of Boston and New York looked like in 1914; and the strange changes that happened to the New York Horse Show in 2263 . . . what McCay illustrated was not our contemporary destruction, but a distant future disaster in the 57th century when Manhattan, so over-built both above and below ground, begins to implode"--rockwell-center.org; The Rising Tide. A fascinating early imagining of Capital run amok by one of the finest American illustrators of the Twentieth Century.