NEW YORK, NY.- The Tuesday, April 15 auction of Old Master Through Modern Prints opens with The Reba W. & Dave H. Williams Collection of Color Woodcuts, featuring color woodcuts by important early twentieth-century American artists who were pioneers in the field, such as Arthur Wesley Dow, Blanche Lazzell, Gustave Baumann, and Edna Boies Hopkins. The sale will also include standout Old Master, European and American prints.

Reba W. and Dave H. Williams began their collection in the mid-1970s and amassed one of the largest most prestigious collections of American prints in the world with over 5,000 works spanning from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, the Williamses championed the history of printmaking in the United States. They were devoted to the study and promotion of the field, founding The Print Research Foundation in 2003 in Stamford, Connecticut, and organizing 18 exhibitions from their collection that traveled around the world. In 2009, they donated a large portion of their collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Highlights from their color woodcut selection include Blanche Lazzell’s Tulips, 1920 ($20,000-30,000), and Petunia Planes, 1952 ($10,000-15,000), Edna Boies Hopkins’s Butterflies, circa 1914-15 ($8,000-12,000), Arthur Wesley Dows Lily, 1898 ($3,000-5,000), and Gustave Baumann’s Tares, 1952 ($5,000-8,000).

The Old Master section includes engravings, woodcuts, etchings and drypoints by both well-known and lesser-known esteemed master printmakers whose images have stood the test of time. Master of the Berlin Passion, Israel van Meckenem the Elder’s The Passion of Christ, circa 1450-70, a group of 10 metalcuts and 17 woodcuts ($25,000-35,000); and Albrecht Dürer’s scarce woodcut The Knight on Horseback and the Lansquenet, circa 1498 ($8,000-12,000), stands alongside etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn and Jacques Callot.

Nineteenth century prints will include an iconic satirical lithograph by Honoré Daumier, A Travers les Ateliers, 1862, which was published in Le Boulevard ($7,000-10,000), and La Fruite en Égypt, 1855 ($12,000-18,000). Works by Impressionist artists, such as Mary Cassatt’s etching At the Dressing Table, circa 1879 ($15,000-20,000), will be presented for sale before a robust section of Art Nouveau prints By Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.

The American section highlights the variety of printmaking techniques championed by American artists in the early twentieth century, including etchings by Martin Lewis, lithographs by Louis Lozowick, and color woodcuts by Alice Ravenel Huger Smith. Notable lots include Lewis’s Glow of the City, 1929 ($20,000-30,000); Lozowick’s Breakfast, 1929 ($2,000-3,000); Ravenel Huger Smith’s Moss Hung Tree, 1918 ($10,000-15,000).

Important artists such as Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Matisse are represented among the modernists in the European section. Highlights include Picasso’s Téte de Femme au Chapeau, color lithograph, 1956 ($25,000-35,000); Kandinsky’s Lithographie für die Vierte Bauhausmappe, color lithograph, 1922 ($12,000-18,000); and Matisse’s Petit Intérieur Bleu, circa 1952 ($15,000-20,000). This section also offers prints by Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.