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Circa 1872 Harry Wright Cabinet Photograph from The Andy Leonard Collection....
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Sold on Feb 20, 2016 for:
$14,340.00
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Description
The only individual cabinet we've encountered of the Hall of Fame pioneer in uniform
Circa 1872 Harry Wright Cabinet Photograph from The Andy Leonard Collection.Update: Please note that this item's proper technical term is a "carte de visite." The CDV appears to have been trimmed along the bottom edge soon after the date of its production.
He appeared in just three games after his fortieth birthday in 1875, so the solid majority of Harry Wright cabinets find the early baseball genius in the civilian garb of his managerial days, a white-bearded predecessor to the Connie Mack aesthetic. Those few exceptions have been, in the full breadth of our experience, team photographs and composites, most notably the enormously important 1869 Peck & Snyder Cincinnati Reds trade card that celebrates the first professional team. Here we present the first uniformed individual Harry Wright cabinet card to have crossed our desks.
Having given the aforementioned Peck & Snyder its fair due, we feel comfortable in asserting that the distinction is an important one, as individual portraits--and particularly those dating to a player's active career--have dominated the baseball trading card hobby since its earliest days. Add a few decorative flourishes to the front, perhaps a stat line on the back, and this card would cause little distraction as it entered a collection of Topps and Goudeys. The 2.5x3.75" dimensions work perfectly.
But we find only the following text, on verso: "Black, 173 Washington St. Boston." This perfectly matches the cultured collector's expectations. In a remarkable coincidence, this Platinum Night auction features the first entry of the exceedingly rare and desirable Mort Rogers scorecard, coveted by collectors for the genuine photography that adorns their covers. Go ahead and flip to that page, or, if you're viewing this lot on the Internet, simply search for that lot online. You'll find that the photo of Wright is the same.
You'll also find, printed at the bottom of the interior of the scorecard, the identical address, identified there as "Rogers & Fitts' Printing & Advertising House." One must conclude that the partnership between esteemed photographer James Wallace Black and Mort Rogers involved the sharing of Black's long-established corporate address, the site of the studio responsible for the most famous photographic portrait of author Walt Whitman, taken as he visited Boston to oversee the typesetting of an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Black likewise developed the very first aerial photograph of a city in that studio, snapped from a hot air balloon 1,200 feet over Boston that same year.
The back of the cabinet card holds a nearly invisible pencil identification of "H. Wright," quite likely in the hand of the man who lovingly saved this image of his friend and teammate. It is the only photograph present in The Andy Leonard Collection.
The corners of the card are rounded by over fourteen decades of storage, and a small and insignificant blemish intersects with Wright's right sleeve, but otherwise the ancient relic provides no cause for complaint. It's a treasure of professional baseball's infancy, linking two members of its first team. Letter of provenance from grandson of Andy Leonard.
The Andy Leonard Collection
The first appearance of the term "the national pastime" in our American lexicon is attributed to the December 5, 1856 edition of the New York Mercury, notable as both the first newspaper to provide regular baseball coverage, and the first Eastern periodical to publish the writings of Mark Twain. Yet, today, that early honorific reads more like prophecy than point of fact. Other publications of the day had toned down the hyperbole, with fellow New York weekly the Spirit of the Times qualifying the assertion, calling baseball "the National game in the region of the Manhattanese" the following year. In 1859, Harper's Weekly likewise protested: "We see no evidence that baseball is so generally practiced by our people as to be fairly called a popular American game."
It would take one of the most terrible and important conflicts in our nation's history to begin to validate the term, the Civil War serving as the wind that swept the sport across the American landscape, every step of the marching armies expanding the sport's geography. But still, even as the terms of surrender were inked at Appomattox, the sobriquet had not reached its fullest, truest expression.
That would only come with the infusion of that most American pastime of all--the profit motive. As post-Civil War Reconstruction heralded the economic transition from agricultural to industrial, the enormous innovation and possibility of the latter gave everything the sudden appearance of an opportunity to monetize. Only then, with the interjection of the capitalist incentive, could the sport stake an honest claim to its patriotic nickname.
Historians will readily admit that the earliest incidents of baseball professionalism are both too varied and too poorly documented to provide anything approaching an accurate biography. As soon as gambling became a part of the sport, which it had from the earliest days, the hiring of "ringers" could not have been far behind, and corruption has always been conducted in the shadows. But when we narrow our focus upon those tributaries that would eventually flow into the river we identify today as Major League Baseball, the headwaters have indeed been charted.
Those maps lie here, in the extraordinary collection that follows, an archive that could be considered the most significant ever to emerge from the infancy of the professional game. As is the case in the construction of so many great American success stories, the early builders' hands are not always entirely clean. This was the age of Tammany Hall, of bribes and kickbacks, of misused influence. But baseball has always been a microcosm of America, slowly bending toward the light and away from the Black Sox scandal, from racial segregation, from performance-enhancing drugs. It is only proper that these earliest documents of professional baseball should contain more of the same.
Andy Leonard was born in Ireland during the Potato Famine to parents who had never set foot on American soil but nonetheless named their son for the young nation's seventh President, Andrew Jackson, who passed away less than a year before Leonard's birth in 1846. The sport of baseball was entirely unknown to the nation of Ireland at the time Leonard's family set sail for America in 1848, though today the Most Valuable Player Award of the Irish Baseball League is named in Leonard's honor.
The family settled in Newark, New Jersey at the heart of the burgeoning phenomenon, just a dozen miles from Hoboken's Elysian Fields where the first organized game had been played just eighteen days after Leonard's birth. The young Irish immigrant developed a fondness and aptitude for the sport in his teenaged years, playing five seasons for the Newburgh (NY) and Irvington (NJ) clubs of the amateur era of the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) beginning in 1864.
But it was a move to Cincinnati in 1868 with fellow journeyman Charlie Sweasy that carries us to the edge of the history of this historic archive. After distinguishing himself as a member of the Buckeyes, Leonard was hired at a salary of $100/month by Harry Wright of the team's chief local rivals in 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, thereby earning the distinction of membership upon the very first fully professional baseball team.
No contracts of that 1869 team have ever surfaced, and it is far from certain that such covenants were ever documented on paper. To be clear, no baseball contracts known to exist outside the archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame or any other public or private institution predate the listings that follow, a remarkable assembly consigned to auction by the octogenarian grandson of Andy Leonard, a gentleman named Charles McCarty.
The archive finds Leonard in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Cincinnati Red Stockings team precipitated by the board of directors' rejection of professionalism following the 1870 season. The impending reversion to amateur status fragmented the club into two main factions. Harry and George Wright would retain the club's nickname in a new home in Boston with a portion of the old team, while Leonard, Sweasy and three others would head to our nation's capital to help found the Washington Olympics. But soon Leonard would rejoin his old teammates to once again become baseball's dominant force.
While the tiniest handful of other contemporary baseball contracts exist in private archives, the Leonard paper trail that leads us through the first decade of organized professional ball is quite simply unparalleled within the historical record. These seminal documents represent the very first pages in the publicly available history of "league" baseball, likewise the earliest of organized professional athletics of any breed.
McCarty informs us that his grandfather, despite his extraordinary relevance to the infancy of professional baseball, lies today in an unmarked grave at New Calvary Cemetery in Boston, less than twenty miles from the South End Grounds where he represented the Red Stockings for seven seasons, the lineal forefather of the modern Atlanta Braves. Both our consignor and Heritage Auctions intend to donate a portion of the proceedings from the sale of these primary documents of our national pastime toward the construction of a suitable monument. All lots within The Andy Leonard Collection will be accompanied by a letter of provenance from McCarty.
Auction Info
2016 February 20 - 21 Platinum Night Auction Sports - New York #7155 (go to Auction Home page)
Auction Dates
February, 2016
20th-21st
Saturday-Sunday
Bids + Registered Phone Bidders: 13
Lot Tracking Activity: N/A
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Buyer's Premium per Lot:
19.5% of the successful bid per lot.
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