Antique Colored Lithograph of “A Visit To The Wharf, Nantucket” by Edgar Jenney, Nantucket, circa 1932

Antique Colored Lithograph of “A Visit To The Wharf, Nantucket” by Edgar Jenney, Nantucket, circa 1932, a limited edition hand colored print on paper view of a Nantucket wharf in the 19th Century, with a ship’s captain with spyglass and wealthy Quaker ship owners and their wives and families promenading on the dock in the foreground with the bowsprit and billethead of a whaleship reaching overhead, Old North Wharf and nantucket town spread in the background, signed and dated in print “Edgar W. Jenney, July 7, 1932” in the lower left, numbered in pencil 11/100 lower left, titled lower center, and bearing a copyright mark lower right.

The print is in good condition, with the paper evenly toned with age.

Edgar Jenney was a diversely talented artist, illustrator, interior designer, and architectural draughtsman who retired from professional life in New York City in 1927 and purchased a home at 13 Vestal Street on Nantucket. He became a prominent member of the Nantucket Art Colony and an early preservationist, creating a brilliant series of watercolor interiors of historic Nantucket houses and buildings in the 1930s, imparting a vibrancy of color, light, and pattern to the material content and ornamental details of grand old Nantucket houses and public buildings—an emphasis that had wide appeal during the height of the Depression.

Born of the Colonial Revival movement, Jenney’s grand interiors provided the pattern for “historic decoration” for many generations to come. He also created an immensely popular series of nostalgic lithographic prints of Nantucket in the heyday of the whaling period. He is perhaps best remembered for the series of murals he painted in the island’s Pacific National Bank.

Jenney was honored posthumously with a retrospective, which included over forty paintings of historic Nantucket houses, at the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and with several memorial exhibitions at the Easy Street Gallery and the Kenneth Taylor Galleries. (Biography courtesy of the Artists Association of Nantucket).

Measures: 12-1/2 in H x 16-1/2 in W
Framed: 17-1/4 in H x 21-1/4 in W