A scarce and wonderful original gouache painting on illustration board by Anne Harriet Fish (sometimes referred to as Anne Sefton Fish after her marriage to Walter Sefton); this was the cover for the December 1921 Christmas edition of Vanity Fair magazine. Work is in the humorous-yet-refined swinging “smart set” art deco style that came to personify the jazz age. This work offers a naughty and decidedly anti-Victorian take on the Christmas mistletoe tradition, and is a defining example of Fish’s whimsical style. Painting is elaborately framed in a hand carved ornate antique wood frame and comes with a bound volume of 1921 Vanity Fair magazines which includes the complete December 1921 volume. Work is unsigned but the title page of the included magazine lists the cover design by “Fish.”

 

 

Anne Harriet Fish was a prolific and gifted painter whose spirit and sense of humor evoke comparisons to her contemporary, the artist John Held Jr. Both artists poked fun at the flapper culture of the Roaring 20s, while evoking and in many ways defining its modernist spirit.

Anne Harriet Fish (Sefton) was born in Bristol, England. She worked in oil, watercolor and gouache and was an illustrator who was active in London, Sussex and St. Ives, Cornwall. She married Walter Sefton in 1918. In New York City, she did cover illustrations for both Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines

Above: verso view