Excerpt from the Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies

Matthew Wilcox, an appraiser with AAA and has been active in the auction business for over a decade including Freeman's in Philadelphia and Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas. Matthew wrote an article entitled, Illustration Art: Problems and Resources for Appraisers. Here is an excerpt from the article. It is from the introduction. The article has a lot of infomration and resources for the appraiser to use and reference. To order the journal, click HERE.


Illustration art is a broad class of collectible property comprised primarily of paintings and drawings created specifically for reproduction in a vast range of forms: books, magazines, posters, comics, advertisements, government propaganda and more. Today this historically overlooked class of art is receiving more attention from art and social historians, who are coming to appreciate the untapped well of cultural information encoded into such “commercial art”. However, it continues to be avid collectors and dealers who continually tap this cultural well, bringing to the public attention and marketplace long ignored artists and artworks. Where once only major illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth or Norman Rockwell earned consideration, today hundreds of once anonymous artists are emerging on the market. Hundreds more are yet to come.

While mechanically reproduced illustrative artworks in one form or another had existed earlier, when we talk about illustration art today, we are really focusing on the last 150 years. The rise of illustration is related to19th century industrialization, and to improved printing technologies. It’s related to the 19th century surge in the American population and to the massive proliferation of inexpensive books, newspapers and periodicals printed on new wood pulp paper; to the rise of the fiction genre in literature; to the public library push; and, most importantly, to the capitalist motivation to sell products and services to an ever more diverse population. Coming of age in America’s “gilded age”, illustrated periodicals and books met resistance from the established cultural elite, who linked artistic and literary mass production of this kind to societal decay. Nevertheless, a true “Illustration Culture” came to predominate American (and European) everyday life for over 70 years, finally subsiding, but not disappearing, due in part to the advent of other media, such as radio and motion pictures, and to the rise of modernism in the early 20th century, which mandated the authentic and original in all things artistic - ideas postmodernists would later challenge.

Regardless of the myriad problems illustration art poses for academic art history, the category presents other challenges altogether for the professional appraiser. Original artworks used for illustrations seem to be coming out of the proverbial woodwork. Years back, in a brief twist of appraisal fate, I came across illustration art originals by Russell Sambrook, Howard Hastings, Rudolph Zallinger, Morton Roberts and Robert McGin-nis, artists apparently unknown to my graduate art history program. They were certainly unknown to me at the time. The near total exclusion of hundreds of eminent American artists from the orthodoxy of academic art history is the first problem an appraiser faces. Next, identifying the creator of piece of illustration art can be difficult, as great numbers of works went unsigned and often shared a common style. Trying to locate the publication or specific use for which an image was created is often a puzzle which cannot be solved without undue delay to an appraisal assignment –if it is solved at all. Finally, an obscure illustrator’s works can confound the search for comparables. Such artworks may be found from time to time quietly slipped into an auction of Fine Books and Ephemera, as only a few houses have chosen to focus on the genre with dedicated Illustration Art departments, notably Illustration House in New York and Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. It is our good fortune that the renewed interest in illustration art is occurring during the age of the Internet; almost all of the most helpful resources for appraisers, scholars or collectors are to be found online at dozens of websites and blogs dedicated to illustration.