
Hannah Shapiro
Cataloguer & Sale Coordinator
Sold for US$1,088 inc. premium
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Provenance
Page Imageworks, San Francisco
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1997
Note
Originally produced to promote his book The Inhabitants to prospective publishers, the present work is from a series of plates that include both image and caption. Although this particular image was not selected for inclusion in the final 1946 publication, Morris elected to reproduce another view of the same house in the book.
The typed caption, taped to the mount beneath the image, reads as follows: 'I'd al[s]ways wanted the green kind, the leather like something you could chew. The kind with round patches on the ankle and a reinforced toe. I used to want them shoes so bad I wouldn't walk anywhere. There was a picture on the page showing some boy scouts out walking, all of them wearing the green leather shoes with the ankle patch. I would sit in the priv[g]y and dream I was walking all over hell. Then when they come, and I walked, I had to carry them home. Sneak off with a hatpin and let the blisters down.'
Maquette plates for The Inhabitants are scarce. At the time of this writing, only a few comparable examples, complete with printed captions, are known to exist, one of which is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1994.243).