Howard Norton Cook valuation

Howard Norton Cook (1901–1980) was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and studied at the Art Students League in New York from 1919 to 1921, going back in 1922 to learn etching under Joseph Pennell. Through the 1920s he travelled widely, sketching in Europe, the Far East and the Middle East, and in 1926 a commission from The Forum to illustrate a novel by Willa Cather took him to New Mexico. He settled in Taos and in 1927 married the painter and printmaker Barbara Latham. He worked in etching, aquatint, lithography, woodcut and wood engraving, printing everything except his lithographs himself, and is best known for prints of New York's skyscrapers and bridges and of the pueblos and rock formations of the Southwest. Carl Zigrosser of the Weyhe Gallery supported him from 1928. Guggenheim Fellowships in 1932 and 1934 took him to Mexico, where he discovered fresco, and through the Ozarks and the American South, and he went on to paint fresco murals in Pittsburgh and San Antonio. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the British Museum.

Besides prints he made drawings, watercolours, pastels and paintings. Dealers identify his prints by their Duffy catalogue number, so note that number with the title, date and technique. Check the signature and look closely at the paper: foxing, light staining and the brown line left by an old acidic mount are common on prints of this age. A Weyhe Gallery label or any early invoice is worth keeping with the print.