Artist: Norman Rockwell
Title: Huckleberry Finn Portfolio
Year created: 1972
Medium: 8 Lithographs on Heavy Arches Paper, in Original Heavy Linen Portfolio with Enclosures
Signed by the artist
Edition: Hand-Signed & Numbered Limited Edition, 65/200, in Original Heavy Linen Portfolio with Enclosures
Height (inches): 25.5
Width (inches): 19.5
This piece is unframed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Description of piece: Norman Rockwell's Huckleberry Finn Portfolio was produced in 1972 as a limited edition suite of eight (8) individually titled original limited edition full color lithographs, all held within a heavy linen portfolio, with additional enclosures. Only 200 complete sets were created.
The complete set includes a heavy linen portfolio, bearing the suite's title, "Huckleberry Finn", along with the artist's name, "Norman Rockwell." Within, the portfolio holds 3 title sheets and 8 individual artworks, each artwork numbered 65/200 in the lower left margin and each hand-signed, in pencil, by the artist in the lower right margin.
The lithographs— as per the enclosed title sheets— are each "based upon incidents in the Mark Twain Novel", the classic, great American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Printed on heavy handmade Velin d'Arches paper by Atelier Mourlot, Paris, the suite of lithographs includes the following titled artworks:
Then Miss Watson took me in the closet and prayed; Jim got down on his knees; Miss Mary Jane; My hands shook; Your eyes is lookin'; Then for three minutes or maybe four; There warn't no harm in them; and, When I lit my candle.
Each of the 8 artworks measures a sizable 25.5" in height x 19.5" width; the Portfolio, which has a cloth ribbon tie-closure, measures 26.75" x 20.5". Norman Rockwell's Huckleberry Finn Portfolio was published by Raymond & Raymond, Inc. in conjunction with Circle Gallery, Ltd., and each individual lithograph bears the blind-stamp embossed insignia of Circle Gallery, Ltd.
It is difficult to find the complete Huckleberry Finn Portfolio in such fine condition, with each of the lithographs never having been framed. This highly collectible suite of Norman Rockwell artworks is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.
Artist bio: Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) artwork captured scenes from American life and culture, skillfully executed with such minute attention to detail and so realistic that they often resembled photographs rather than paintings. During Rockwell's prodigious career he painted over 300 cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. He also is noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America, during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life (with which he began his career at age 18), annual calendars, and other illustrations.
Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than four thousand original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell also was commissioned to illustrate more than forty books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the "Four Seasons" illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for seventeen years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He painted six images for Coca-Cola advertising. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "God Bless the Hills", which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator. In 1969, as a tribute to Rockwell's seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, officials of Brown & Bigelow and the Boy Scouts of America asked Rockwell to pose in Beyond the Easel, the calendar illustration that year.
Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2001. Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby's auction. A twelve-city U.S. tour of Rockwell's works took place in 2008. In 2008, Rockwell was named the official state artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The 2013 sale of Saying Grace for $46 million established a new record price for Rockwell art. Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Reading Public Museum and the Church History Museum in 2013–2014.
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