Lot 168: HENRY HERRICK (1824-1906) NEW ENGLAND WATERCOLOR

Henry Herrick (1824-1906) Original Watercolor and Gouache "Cattle at the River's Edge" New Hampshire. In an original period carved gilt wood frame. 15 1/2"x24 1/2"x2" in frame. Weight 8 pds. PROVENANCE: A Private Charleston SC Estate. Herrick was born in Hopkinton, New Hampshire in 1824. His father was a merchant and lumber dealer. His mother was an amateur painter who had studied with Jedediah Morse, the father of Samuel F. B. Morse, and it was she who recognized and encouraged young Henry’s artistic bent. At the age of eight he was painting flowers, birds, and other objects of nature under her tutelage. At the age of twenty he went to New York to study at the National Academy of Design, and within six months he was busily engaged in making book engravings for leading publishing houses, reproducing the works of noted painters and also doing original engravings. In 1852 Herrick took a job as a teacher at the newly founded School of Design for Women, and four years later he became its principal. He was an early crusader for equal employment rights for women in the engraving profession. He left the school in 1858 to concentrate on his own work as an engraver, and during the Civil War he was a leading engraver for Harper’s Weekly. In 1865, after a highly successful career as an art teacher and wood engraver in New York City, Henry W. Herrick returned to his family’s home in Manchester, New Hampshire, to care for his aging mother. He was forty-one years old, portly, dignified, and soon, with his tall silk hat and gold-headed cane, he became something of an institution in the culture-poor cotton-mill community, a pillar of the First Congregational Church and a founder of the Manchester Art Association. Although he was a familiar figure on its streets, as an artist Herrick turned his back for the most part on Manchester’s bustling industrial heart and took his sketchbook instead to the quiet residential avenues that fed from it and, farther beyond, to the winding dirt roads that led into the New Hampshire countryside.

good,loss to frame corners