Kerr Eby
Shipping
1932

Name: Shipping
Brand: Kerr Eby
Price: 700 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Kerr Eby 'Shipping' also 'Shipping, Connecticut', etching and sandpaper ground, 1932, edition 100, Giardina 171. Signed in pencil and titled 'Shipping' in the bottom left sheet edge. A superb, atmospheric impression, with skillfully controlled plate tone, on heavy, cream wove paper; the full sheet with wide margins (2 to 2 3/4 inches), in excellent condition. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 8 3/8 x 17 1/4 inches (316 x 176 mm); sheet size 13 7/16 x 8 3/8 inches (341 x 213 mm). The scene depicted was on the Connecticut coast. Impressions of this work are in the permanent collections of the following institutions: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (Glasgow, Scotland), Herbert F, Johnson Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of Iowa Museum of Art, University of Wyoming Art Museum. ABOUT THE ARTIST Kerr Eby was born in 1890 in Tokyo, Japan, the son of Methodist missionaries from Canada. The family returned to Vancouver when Eby was only three, and he grew up studying art encouraged by his parents as his mother was from a family of prominent artists. By age twelve, he had lived in Vancouver, Kingston, Toronto and Bracebridge where he found work as a ‘printer’s devil’ on the local Bracebridge newspaper. After graduating from high school in 1907, Eby moved to New York City to study art, first at the Pratt Institute, and later at the Art Students League. He enrolled in art classes at Pratt Institute while working for a lithographic firm earning $4.00 a week. His pay barely covered his room and drawing supplies. Within a year, starving and feeling defeated, he returned to Canada and was employed by a surveying party in Northern Ontario. Eby gradually regained his dream of becoming an artist, and in his spare time, he began to draw the surrounding wilderness landscapes. By fall he had returned to New York to attend night classes at the Art Students League while working for another lithographic firm. He spent several more summers surveying in Northern Ontario before he was able to make a living as an illustrator. During this period he formed several friendships with influential artists including John Henry Twachtman and Childe Hassam and joined a summer artists' colony founded by them at Cos Cob, Connecticut. He supported himself by working as a magazine illustrator and at the American Lithographic Company. Through diligent study and practice, Eby refined both his drawing and printmaking techniques. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Eby joined the U.S. Army. Failing to obtain a commission as an artist, he was assigned first to ambulance duty and later as a sergeant in the 40th Engineers in France. He spent most of WWI on the front line as a camouflager of the field artillery ‘big guns”. On his time off duty, he would sketch everything he witnessed, from the explosive big guns and men in action to the dead soldiers in the field. He sent the drawings home each week, and upon his return from the war, they became the basis for his first successful group of etchings. He continued creating his war-related prints throughout the 1920s and '30s as his work became widely exhibited Frederick Keppel, the renowned print dealer and a relative of Eby, became the exclusive agent for many of his print editions. With another global conflict beginning in the mid-1930s, Eby wanted to show the world the true face of war. In 1935, he published a book of this prints, entitled simply ‘War’. These powerful works depict the horror and disillusionment he experienced in combat and remain some of the most compelling anti-war images ever produced in this country. When the United States declared war in 1941, Eby tried to enlist but was turned down because of his age. He received his opportunity to serve, however, when Abbott Laboratories developed its combat artist program. Between October 1943 and January 1944, he traveled with Marines in the South Pacific and witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of the war, landing with the invasion force at Tarawa. While living three weeks in a foxhole in Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, he contracted a tropical disease, from which he never recovered. He completed his final drawings for Abbott but was unable to complete the etchings he intended to make. He died in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1946. Eby was an Associate of the National Academy NA (1930); National Academy of Design (1934); Society of American Etchers; Chicago Society of Etchers; Philadelphia Society of Etchers; National Institute of Arts and Letters. Kerr Eby's work can be found in numerous museums and public collections.

Creator:

Kerr Eby (1890 - 1946, American)

Creation Year:

1932

Dimensions:

Height: 8.38 in (21.29 cm)Width: 17.25 in (43.82 cm)

Medium:

Etching

Movement & Style:

American Impressionist

Period:

1940-1949