Personal History: First Date
Way way way back in March of 1986, the auction house, Guernsey’s offered up what seemed liked a zillion pieces of original art from the worlds of comic art and illustration. The art was displayed in a giant room at the New York Armory along Park avenue.
I’d never seen anything like it before, or since. A healthy portion of the offered work was New Yorker art, including one of the drawings that was published within James Thurber’s Pet Department series*: the horse wearing moose antlers.
The biggest draw for me at the auction was the inclusion of a Thurber drawing (listed as lot B228D on a sheet of work added after the catalog was printed). As you see below, the sheet did not specify which Thurber Pet Department drawing was being offered. For me, what mattered was that there was a Thurber original to be seen (finally!).
Although I’d been collecting Thurber books for over a decade, I’d never seen an original drawing of his. It turned out that neither had a colleague, Liza Donnelly, who I’d met briefly in 1984 at Michelle Urry’s** apartment during a party she’d thrown for cartoonists.
Now, in 1986, at yet another cartoonists get-together hosted by The New Yorker cover artist Roxie Munro, Ms. Donnelly and I fell into a conversation about the Guernsey auction — specifically the Thurber they were offering. And so we agreed to go see the drawing together. We chronicled the Armory date in our Cartoon Marriage book:
The drawing was on a table — as seen in our sketch above — surrounded by piles (and piles) of other drawings. Ms. Donnelly came to The New Yorker, as did I, out of out a love for Thurber’s work; finally locating the “real deal” in that vast room, was to us, a moment, like finding Cartoon Gold. As Ms. Donnelly notes in the above panel, we didn’t bid on the horse/moose drawing. It went out into the world somewhere (but where?!).
We do have an original New Yorker drawing from that auction. Our friend and colleague, Jack Ziegler had scooped up a bunch of drawings that day, and later generously gave Liza and I a Charles Barsotti drawing he’d bought. It hangs in our living room, a daily reminder of a memorable day at the Armory.
*The horse wearing moose antlers made its print debut in Thurber’s The Owl In The Attic, published in 1931 by Harper & Bros.
**Michelle Urry was the long time cartoon editor of Playboy.