Antique Pair of Hand Colored Prints of “The Ship Owner” and “The Ship Owner’s Lady” by Edgar Jenney, circa 1930s

Antique Pair of Hand Colored Prints of “The Ship Owner” and “The Ship Owner’s Lady” by Edgar Jenney, circa 1930s, comprising a hand colored print on paper portrait of a wealthy Quaker gentleman strutting proudly on Lower Main Street before the Pacific Club, with ship’s masts rising in the background; and the companion hand colored print on paper portrait of a wealthy Quaker lady in bonnet and hoop skirt, standing on Upper Main Street with Pacific National Bank and Church in background; both are signed in print lower left, titled lower center and marked with copyright in lower right.

Both prints remain in excellent condition.

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: 12-1/8 in H x 8-3/8 in W each
Framed: 17-1/2 in H x 13-5/8 in W