Mr. Hardy Lee, His Yacht. Being XXIV Sketches on Stone, by Chinks.

About this Item

First edition. This remarkably uncommon and finely illustrated work offers a humorous look at yachting in antebellum America; WorldCat locates eight copies only, all in American libraries, five of these in Massachusetts; auction records show just since three copies since 1925. Intriguingly, the accomplished lithography has been attributed to Winslow Homer. Clearly produced in small numbers for a circle of the author's friends, family, and sailing enthusiasts, this is an outstanding survival of early yachting in New England. The story features Mr. Hardy Lee, a Bostonian dandy, who comes into a fortune and immediately spends it all on the yacht Windseye. The plates show amusing caricatures of social encounters and detailed sailing scenes along the New England coast in the day of sail. Especially notable are the views of a ship-master's shop, Windseye under sail, and another of her becalmed in Boston Harbor, in addition to a superb view of her sailing wing-and-wing. "Hardy Lee" is a pun on the sailing expression "hard a-lee", said by a skipper to indicate that the boat is beginning to tack. The navy surgeon and artist Charles Ellery Stedman (1831 1909) "was one of those fortunate men who had an innate ability to draw realistic impressions of the people and scenes around him, and we are fortunate that he had a life-long impulse to do so" (Pennsylvania Magazine, p. 131). Stedman's original sketches for Mr. Hardy Lee are now preserved at the Boston Athenaeum. He was known for his drawings made during the Civil War and published as The Civil War Sketchbook of Charles Ellery Stedman, Surgeon, United States Navy in 1978. The lithography has long been attributed to Winslow Homer, the cousin of Stedman. A product of the partnership was this book, which was intended as "a series of satirical cartoons about yachting, based on the national enthusiasm caused by the America's victory, and signed by 'Chinks' in accordance with Stedman's life-long propensity to conceal his tracks" (ibid.). He apprenticed with J. H. Bufford, a Boston commercial lithographer from 1855 to 1856, subsequently opening his own studio in Boston. His irksome apprenticeship concluded in 1827 and his budding freelance career overlaps with the publication date of Mr. Hardy Lee. Homer's role was underlined in Tom Hale's re-publication of the book in 2001 and 2004. This new edition, by the great-grandnephew of Stedman, contains a chapter written by the historian Eric Rudd, who argues that Homer is the artist transferring Stedman's 24 whimsical sketches to the lithographic stones. Rudd made the same assertion in an article for Antiques Magazine, in November 1974. He also suggests that the book serves as a precursor to the graphic novel. Provenance: contemporary ownership inscription of Robert Porter Keep, dated Christmas 1857, on the front free endpaper. Keep (1844-1904), a Yale graduate, became the United States consul at Piraeus in Greece (1869-71), later becoming headmaster of Miss Porter's School for Girls in Farmington, CT. Morris & Howland, p. 313 (1950 edition). Not in Toy. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, January, 1978. Landscape quarto. Original red half roan professionally rebacked and recornered, lithographed pictorial boards, yellow endpapers. With 24 single-tint lithographs. Some rubbing and soiling of boards, endpapers slightly creased with minor loss to lower edge of front flyleaf, plates foxed as usual, one plate with marginal repair on lower edge using clear tape. A very good copy. Seller Inventory # 151995

Contact seller

Report this item

Bibliographic Details