Sale 2649 - Lot 5

ALBERT ALEXANDER SMITH (1896 - 1940)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Etching on cream wove paper, 1922. 254x194 mm; 10x7 inches, full margin. Frame watermark.

This portrait of British-Sierra Leonean composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is part of a 1922 series of prints by Albert Alexander Smith which celebrate people of African descent. Here Coleridge-Taylor is pictured with his best known composition "The Song of Hiawatha," which was later adapted by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Alexander Smith's series includes etchings of Alexandre Dumas, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.