Beatrix Potter Drawings and The New Yorker's Most Reprinted Cartoon to Auction

Three illustrations from Beatrix Potter's There was an Old Woman Who lived in a Shoe lead Heritage Auction's October 6 Illustration Art sale which also features work by Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, and Charles Addams, plus examples from the pulp and pin-up genres.

The circa 1917 drawings comprise a three-page rhyme sequence of six of eight lines in Potter's hand and pictures of a running mouse, a mother mouse with babies and cradle, and a white mouse lying in bed. "Mice proliferate in most of Beatrix Potter's early rhyme pictures," said Anne Stevenson Hobbs, former Curator of Children's Literature at the Victoria and Albert Museum, "often charmingly clothed but still mouse-like. She became especially fond of mice. Animals tucked up in bed, sick or sleeping, were a favorite subject.”

Other significant lots from the Golden Age of illustration include the 1993 cartoon On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog by Peter Steiner, the most reproduced cartoon in the history of The New Yorker magazine. "I realized the cartoon is autobiographical and that it's about being an imposter or feeling like an imposter," Steiner said. "I've had several checkered careers, and in every one, I felt like a bit of a fraud. I think many people have that syndrome."