Auction Watch: A Richard McCallister Rough
While scanning Ebay this morning I was surprised to come across the Richard McCallister rough shown below; I’d seen it quite awhile ago, and then hadn’t seen it for a long time — I assumed it found a home.
McCallister (who died in 1995) was primarily an idea person — his captions/ideas were central to the output of a number of top shelf New Yorker cartoonists in the magazine’s earlier years, including Peter Arno, George Price, and Chon Day. The New York Public Library holds his papers (they were essential to my Peter Arno research). As far as Arno goes, we never would’ve had, among many others, his classic “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt” if not for McCallister.
McCallister not only provided a ton of ideas to New Yorker cartoonists, he was a New Yorker cartoonist himself, contributing a highly respectable 89 drawings from November 9, 1957 through October 11, 1993. While this rough drawing may not be cartoon gold, it came from a major figure in the magazine’s Golden Age of Cartooning.
Here’s a great (undated) photo originally found in Lee Lorenz’s Art Of The New Yorker 1925-1995, and (with permission) later published in my Arno biography. Left to right: James Geraghty (The New Yorker‘s Art Editor from 1939-1973), Richard McCallister (in the forefront), Lee Lorenz (Geraghty’s successor, from 1973 – 1997), and Charles Addams.
