Every day Sophie Dupre presents two items from her large stock of signed photographs, autograph letters, autographs for sale, royal memoralbilia and antiquarian manuscripts.
The photographs are presented with the catalogue descriptions.
On this day... see what happened on your special day
February 22
On this day in 1732 1st American president George Washington was born in Virginia and in 1980 the artist Oskar Kokoschka died at the age of 93
KOKOSCHKA (Oskar, 1886-1980, Austrian-born British Artist, Poet & Playwright)
Fine Autograph Letter Signed with Initials to Gaby GOLDSCHEIDER in London, daughter of his old friend and collaborator Ludwig GOLDSCHEIDER (1896-1973, Austrian-born Art Historian & Poet), who founded the Phaidon Press in Vienna in 1923 and then in England in 1938), in German with transcription and translation, saying he knows “that your dear father is no longer alive. I wrote you a letter a little while ago. I am very sorry that, again, one of my few true friends is gone ... By good fortune you always got on well with him and he needed that very much because he too had no one else in a world that was ever more foreign to him ... I would dearly like to see you once more”, he continues “Your wood engravings are not supposed to go through the post” but have to be hand-carried, “I have to take these to the ‘Customs Office’, God knows where it is situated in Lausanne ... signing for everything takes such a time, doesn’t it?”, asking “... Do you make a living? Are you going to get married one day?”, and ending “it is too late for Happy Easter”, so “best wishes for Whitsun and come once more and see your O.K.”, with a beautiful reproduction of a scene in colours by the artist, showing park land sloping down to a river, people promenading and couples dancing under the trees, watched by a mounted rider in the bottom left corner, at the head Kokoschka has pasted a strip of paper, with, in pencil in English, “for Gaby at Easter-time from OK”, 5½” x 8¼”, and with the original autograph envelope, the letter 2 sides 8vo, Villeneuve, Vaud, Switzerland, 24th April 1974
WASHINGTON (George, 1732-1799, 1st President of the United States of America)
Fine signature, no place, no date
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