Portrait of Frida Kahlo. Sternberger, Mexico City, 1952, printed 2017

Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera had become intimate friends of photographer Marcel Sternberger and his wife Ilse by that time. The couple held Sternberger’s work in such high regard that Rivera said it was the first time [I’ve] seen the real me and above his bed in Kahlo’s lifelong house La Caza Azul hangs a portrait of Frida by Sternberger.

$1,525

Collection of three portraits of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Various photographers, 1860s-1880s

Three portraits of Emerson

$1,500

Portrait of Sigmund Freud. London, 1938, printed 2017

Sternberger and Freud had known each other for years before they fled Europe with the rise of Nazism. Though Freud was terminally ill and at first hesitant about receiving visitors in 1938, the neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis said it “makes me feel good to see old-familiar faces again” when Sternberger arrived. This is said to have been Freud’s last portrait session before his death in 1939.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of George Bernard Shaw. London, 1938, printed 2017

Shaw is pictured in three-quarter view with artful shadow play down the right side of his face. Sternberger was a ‘master of light and shadow’ according to contemporary museum directors.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of George Bernard Shaw examining stamps. London, 1938, printed 2017

In this portrait Shaw examines the stamps which Sternberger had designed for the Belgian Royal Family, featuring the Royal children. Shaw was a philatelist, and the offer of the stamps was part of Sternberger’s method to gain access to Shaw.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of Stieglitz’s Paramour Dorothy Norman. New York, 1948, printed 2017

Norman learned the art of photography from Alfred Stieglitz and became a highly skilled amateur. The two became lovers while Stieglitz was married to Georgia O’Keeffe.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of Novelist Stefan Zweig. London, 1938, printed 2017

Like Einstein and Freud, Sternberger had known Zweig from before the war. The Austrian novelist and playwright was among the most popular writers in the world in the 1920s and 1930s. His work was recently the basis for the Wes Anderson film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Basis for the U.S. Dime. Washington, 1939, printed 2017

This photograph was the basis for FDR’s bust on the face of the American dime, first minted in 1946.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of Author Pearl S. Buck. New York, 1948, printed 2017

Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 for “notable works which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art.”

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300

Portrait of Ambassador Dr. Hu Shih. Washington, 1939, printed 2017

Dr. Hu was educated under the Boxer [War] Indemnity Scholarship program and was a graduate of Cornell University. At the time of this sitting he was China’s ambassador to the United States. A respected member of the Chinese intelligentsia, he advocated for the written vernacular Chinese that is still in use today.

$900 unframed; framed: $1,300