Original silhouette portrait of Walt Whitman reading

[Cedar Brook, New Jersey], 1922. Original silhouette portrait of Walt Whitman reading a book, executed freehand by Helene Nyce, a popular American illustrator and silhouettist of the early twentieth century. Best remembered for Flossie Fisher’s Funnies, a series of comic features that ran in Ladies Home Journal from 1910 to 1918, Nyce also worked in a more austere vein: this sensitive portrait of the Good Gray Poet, cut in minute detail from a single sheet of paper, has a monumental quality. In 1982, reviewing an exhibition of Nyce’s “delicate scissor-cuttings” at the Museum of American Folk Art, the New York Times observed: “This Germanic art of ‘scherenschnitte’ is displayed in the form of portraits and entire scenes that seem impossible to be the handiwork of scissors and more the labor of fine incision.” A fine original portrait, signed by Helene Nyce. Silhouette portrait cut from black paper, measuring 4.5 x 5.5 inches, pasted to backing sheet measuring 5.5 x 6.75 inches, signed in ink beneath image. Mounted inside original plain cardboard folder, with ink note to rear cover: “Walt Whitman – freehand cutting by Helene Nyce – 1922.”. (Inventory #: 1003987)