EDMONIA LEWIS  

    First Internationally Acclaimed African American Sculptor

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Recent Auction Values

In October 2007, a private collector purchased the 1879 'Veiled' Bride of Spring from Cowan's Auctions in Cincinnati for $138,000. It had originally been donated to Good Samaritan hospital in Cincinnati, then put out to salvage when the hospital moved to a new building. It was finally found in a Kentucky library.

Much of Edmonia Lewis’s work is in Scotland, England, Germany.  In April 2003, an early version of the prize-winning Asleep, titled Night, was sold by Sotheby's London for $130,000 to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Night was found in Scotland.

A copy of her highly praised bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was recently donated by a Welsh family to the British National Museums Liverpool in Lieu of taxes, valued at $117,000. The copy was commissioned directly from the sculptor by Henry Robertson Sandbach (1807-1895), who bragged of his bargain price.  Sandbach, a wealthy West India Merchant, was a leading British collector of contemporary sculpture.  Her original portrait, which is larger, is at Harvard University.

Newark Museum purchased two marble busts, Hiawatha and Minnehaha, at $76,375 and $64,625, respectively, at Christies' auction in 2000.

Sotheby’s New York records $85,000 for the Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter in 1996 and $87,750 in 1994, $39,100 for the Marriage of Hiawatha in 1995 and $68,762 in 1992, and $9,775 for Poor Cupid in 1994.