Duck Decoys [Mallard, Blue Winged Teal, Pintail].
N.p: n.d. [ca. 1940s].
Two small acrylic paintings on canvas board, finished studies, each showing the design of duck decoys, with top and side views, with a detail of a head, 10 figures in all. 2 vols. Each about 8 x 10 inches. Framed and glazed. Identified in a Connett family hand, "Painted by Dr. Edgar Burke". Fine Provenance: Eugene V. Connett, 3rd; Eugene V. Connett IV. Item #242624
Edgar Burke, MD (1889-1950) successfully combined the vocation of medicine (he was a member of the American College of Physicians and Surgeons) and the avocation of sport. He was an enthusiastic wildfowler and upland gunner, an expert angler and fly tier (he designed the flies "Doctor Burke" and "Family Secret") and was interested in pigeon racing and cock fighting (it was he, in the Jersey City cock-fights of the 1930s, who sewed up the wounds of the injured birds). He was also a celebrated sporting artist, illustrating two Derrydale Press classics, Feathered Game (1929) and Upland Game Bird Shooting in America (1930), and producing front cover vignettes for seven more, including Grouse Feathers and De Shootinest Gent'man.
He was, notes Siegel, a childhood companion and lifetime friend of Derrydale proprietor Eugene Connett - a relationship that paid large dividends for readers of the Press and of Connett's later works, to which Burke contributed illustrations or text.
Fine, decorative paintings on a subject Burke had mastered: he wrote and illustrated the chapter on decoy making in Duck Shooting along the Atlantic Tidewater (1948).
Price: $1,750.00 Free International Delivery
