HOMER, Winslow (attrib.), & Charles Ellery Stedman, as Chinks.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Mr. Hardy Lee, His Yacht. Being XXIV Sketches on Stone, by Chinks. First edition. This remarkably uncommon and finely illustrated work offers a humorous look at yachting in antebellum America; WorldCat locates eight copies only, all in American libraries, five of these in Massachusetts; auction records show just since three copies since 1925. Intriguingly, the accomplished lithography has been attributed to Winslow Homer.Clearly produced in small numbers for a circle of the author's friends, family, and sailing enthusiasts, this is an outstanding survival of early yachting in New England. The story features Mr. Hardy Lee, a Bostonian dandy, who comes into a fortune and immediately spends it all on the yacht Windseye. The plates show amusing caricatures of social encounters and detailed sailing scenes along the New England coast in the day of sail. Especially notable are the views of a ship-master's shop, Windseye under sail, and another of her becalmed in Boston Harbor, in addition to a superb view of her sailing wing-and-wing. "Hardy Lee" is a pun on the sailing expression "hard a-lee", said by a skipper to indicate that the boat is beginning to tack. The navy surgeon and artist Charles Ellery Stedman (1831-1909) "was one of those fortunate men who had an innate ability to draw realistic impressions of the people and scenes around him, and we are fortunate that he had a life-long impulse to do so" (Pennsylvania Magazine, p. 131). Stedman's original sketches for Mr. Hardy Lee

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